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.

As Pastor Tara Beth Leach writes in her award commendation:

“Miroslav Volf offers a profound critique of competitive striving through a rich theological and philosophical lens. His writing is lucid, humane, and timely, inviting readers to reimagine ambition through the way of love.” Volf’s reflections speak directly into today’s atmosphere of achievement-driven anxiety, offering both diagnosis and hope.

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Rethinking Ambition in a Competitive Culture

Throughout its chapters, The Cost of Ambition examines the hidden moral and spiritual costs of tying one’s worth to outperforming others. Volf identifies how “superiority-driven ambition” distorts the self, fractures relationships, and narrows our vision of the good life.

But the book does more than critique. Volf invites readers to imagine an alternative: excellence rooted in love, a form of ambition shaped by communion rather than competition. Drawing on Scripture, Christian tradition, and philosophical reasoning, he explores how humility, gratitude, and relational wholeness can reorient ambition toward flourishing for self and neighbor.

A Vision for Excellence Shaped by Love

Rather than asking us to renounce ambition altogether, Volf proposes that Christians cultivate the kind of striving that reflects God’s love and honors the dignity of others. His later chapters highlight practices that disentangle identity from achievement and comparison. The result is a deeply hopeful vision: ambition not as rivalry, but as a shared pursuit of goodness, beauty, and faithful presence in the world.

The book offers a path toward becoming people whose lives are marked by excellence that is not competitive, but generative—radiating outward for the sake of community and the common good.

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Purchase The Cost of Ambition

Publisher (Brazos / Baker) https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/products/9781587434815_the-cost-of-ambition

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Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Cost-Ambition-Striving-Christian-Theology/dp/1587434814

Deepen your engagement with the themes of ambition, flourishing, and the Christian life

Video Curriculum and Discussion Guide for Personal Reflection, Book Clubs, Community Groups, Church Sermon Series, and More

https://faith.yale.edu/resource-downloads/the-cost-of-ambition

Explore discussion guides, reflection prompts, and formation resources to help communities rethink ambition in light of Christian love.

Podcast Episode

https://faith.yale.edu/media/how-striving-to-be-better-than-others-makes-us-worse

Watch Volf unpack the book’s central insight: how reimagining ambition can reshape our relationships, our work, and our sense of identity.