41 Facts About Miroslav Volf

Miroslav Volf was born on September 25,1956 and is a Croatian Protestant theologian and public intellectual and Henry B Wright Professor of Theology and director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale University.

Miroslav Volf previously taught at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in his native Osijek, Croatia and Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.

Miroslav Volf has served as an advisor for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and for several years co-taught a course at Yale with former British prime minister Tony Blair on globalization.

Miroslav Volf is a frequent commentator on religious and cultural issues in popular media outlets such as CNN, NPR, and Al Jazeera.

Miroslav Volf won the 2002 University of Louisville and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary Grawemeyer Award in Religion and his 1996 book Exclusion and Embrace was named by Christianity Today as one of the 100 Most Influential Books of the Twentieth Century.

Miroslav Volf was born on September 25,1956, in Osijek, Croatia, which was then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Miroslav Volf later recalled about his childhood that he did not have the luxury of "entertaining faith merely as a set of propositions that you do or don't assent to".

Miroslav Volf studied philosophy and classical Greek at the University of Zagreb and theology at Zagreb's Evangelical-Theological Seminary.

From 1980 to 1985 Miroslav Volf pursued a doctorate at the University of Tubingen, Germany, under the supervision of Jurgen Moltmann.

Miroslav Volf's dissertation was a theological engagement with Karl Marx' philosophy of labor, and pursuing this project led him to study both German idealist philosophy and English political economy.

The Habilitation was on "Trinity and Communion", a topic stimulated by Miroslav Volf's long standing involvement in the official dialogue between the Vatican's Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the international Pentecostal movement.

In 1979, Miroslav Volf began his teaching career as a lecturer in systematic theology at his alma mater in Croatia.

In 1991, Miroslav Volf took a position as an Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller, succeeding his former teacher at that institution, Paul King Jewett.

Miroslav Volf remained in this position until 1997 when Fuller appointed him to a full professorship.

In 1998 Volf took the position of Henry B Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut.

The systematic contours of Miroslav Volf's theology are most clearly visible in Free of Charge.

Miroslav Volf published the new, pneumatological account of work in Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work.

In 1985 Miroslav Volf became a member of the Pentecostal side of the official Roman Catholic and Pentecostal dialogue.

The theme of the dialogue for the five years that followed was communio, and, together with Peter Kuzmic, Miroslav Volf wrote the first position paper.

Miroslav Volf seeks to both show that a Free church ecclesiology is a theologically legitimate form of ecclesiology and to give that typically individualistic ecclesiology focused on the lordship of Christ a more robustly communal character by tying it to the communal nature of God.

Miroslav Volf takes Joseph Ratzinger and John Zizioulas as his dialogue partners, and critiques their anchoring of the communal and hierarchical nature of the church in hierarchical Trinitarian relations.

Miroslav Volf's position is not that hierarchical forms of ecclesiology are illegitimate.

Miroslav Volf is probably best known for Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation.

The book grew out of a lecture Miroslav Volf gave in Berlin in 1993, in which his task was to reflect theologically about the Yugoslav Wars, marked by ethnic cleansing, that was raging in his home country at the time.

The evocative "embrace" is the central category of the book, and Miroslav Volf proposed it as an alternative to "liberation".

Miroslav Volf sees the father in the story of the prodigal son as an exemplar of this stance.

Miroslav Volf succinctly articulated the Trinitarian underpinnings of his proposal in "The Trinity is Our Social Program,", a text in which he both argues for a correspondence between God's Trinitarian nature and human relations and stances, and underscores the ineradicable limitations of such correspondences.

Miroslav Volf argues that it isn't enough that we remember the past, but that we must remember the past rightly.

An important feature of Miroslav Volf's work is the theological interpretation of the scriptures.

Miroslav Volf has brought his theology of embrace to bear on how people of different faiths relate to each other.

Miroslav Volf focuses on Islam partially because he comes from a region in which these two faiths have intersected for centuries and partly because he considers the relations between these two religions to be today's most critical interfaith issue.

Since 2004 Miroslav Volf has taken part in the Building Bridges Seminar, a yearly gathering of Muslim and Christian scholars chaired until 2012 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

When Miroslav Volf moved to the United States, he continued to write for church audiences.

Miroslav Volf wrote occasional articles and gave interviews for Christianity Today, and for many years he wrote a regular column "Faith Matters" for The Christian Century.

Miroslav Volf contends that with regard to the public realm Christians face two major dangers : one is to withdraw from public life and to leave their faith "idling" in all spheres outside their private and church lives; the other is to be engaged, but to do so in a coercive way, shoving the demands of their faith down the throats of those who embrace other faiths or no faith at all.

Positively, Miroslav Volf argues against two extremes: against a complete separation of faith from public life, a kind of secularist exclusion of religion from public realm, and against a complete saturation of public life by one dominant religion, a kind of religious totalitarianism.

Miroslav Volf is present in the media, giving interviews to major news organizations in this country and abroad.

In 2003, Miroslav Volf founded the Yale Center for Faith and Culture housed at Yale Divinity School.

Miroslav Volf was previously married to New Testament scholar Judith Gundry; the marriage ended in divorce.

Miroslav Volf has partial custody of his two sons, Nathanael and Aaron, who live with their mother four days a week and their father three days a week, according to their divorce settlement.

Miroslav Volf is a member of the Episcopal Church in the US.