Books We Loved in 2025

At the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, we all have contracted a contagious and incurable condition: we love books. These are the books we loved in 2025.

Yale Center for Faith & Culture

The Cost of Ambition Wins Christianity Today Best Book Award

Miroslav Volf’s The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse has been named the Theology (Popular) category winner in Christianity Today’s 2025–2026 Book Awards. The recognition highlights the work’s clarity, moral urgency, and pastoral relevance in a cultural moment marked by pressure, comparison, and chronic striving.

Yale Center for Faith & Culture

Yale Center for Faith & Culture 2025 Partner Scholars

Introducing our first cohort of YCFC Partner Scholars: colleagues in scholarship and thought from a variety of institutions and backgrounds, whose exceptional work we want to uplift in collaboration.

Yale Center for Faith & Culture

You That Listen

Drew Collins comments on the significance of understanding in hearing Jesus, listening to Jesus, and following Jesus.

Drew Collins

The Joy of Humility

The true meaning of humility persistently drives debate, largely because we cannot agree on the word’s definition. The "correctness" of normative terms matters, and humility carries a distinctive normative weight. How we understand humility is not a matter of mere semantics. It is a pursuit of inquiry with the potential to inform—perhaps even to transform—our lives. The Joy of Humility takes up this task with a view toward the perennial question of what entails a truly flourishing life. Here, philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and psychologists work to frame the debate in such a way that the conversation can move forward.

Drew Collins

The End of Youth Ministry?

What is youth ministry actually for? And does it have a future? Andrew Root weaves together an innovative first-person fictional narrative to diagnose the challenges facing the church today and to offer a new vision for youth ministry in the 21st century.

Andrew Root

Exclusion and Embrace

If the healing word of the Gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Is there any hope of embracing our enemies? Of opening the door to reconciliation?

Miroslav Volf

Always On

Angela Gorrell

How and Why We Grow

Liz Hall and Todd Hall join Evan Rosa on how people grow: attachment, suffering, virtue, and why intimacy with God is the goal of formation. Sponsored by the Practice Unto Virtue program at the Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture at Westmont College and the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

Elizabeth Hall

Technology, Wonder, and Attention

Aaron Cline Hanbury joins Evan Rosa on technology's non-neutrality, attention media, and reclaiming wonder in the age of AI and endless feeds.

Aaron Cline Hanbury

You Must Change Your Life

Bruce Herman joins Evan Rosa on making as sacred resistance to consumer culture—plus submission, beauty, suffering, and creating from love, not fear.

Bruce Herman

I Don't Know What Faith Means Anymore

Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman join Mark Oppenheimer to discuss faith, doubt, cancer, and what it means to love God, from their new book Glimmerings.

Christian Wiman