The Charles Gore Lecture: God, Gratitude, and Being at Home in the World

Miroslav Volf gives the annual Gore Lecture on God, Gratitude, and Being at Home in the World.<br />
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Charles Gore (1853-1932) was a Canon of Westminster between 1894 and 1902. As a memorial to him an endowment fund for a series of annual lectures was established and since 1935 a lecture has been held at the Abbey almost every year.<br />
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This year’s lecture is given by Miroslav Volf, Founder and Director of Yale Center for Faith and Culture and Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology, Yale University Divinity School, New Haven, CT.<br />
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Ahead of his lecture, he said: 'We will likely never feel at home in a disenchanted world in which there is no place for love and gratitude in public life. Anthony Kronman has recently argued that the Christian faith, with its imposition of impossible gratitude to God on its adherents, is the main culprit for the emergence of such a world. Leaning on Martin Luther, a pivotal figure in the history of the West whom Kronman considers the main culprit for our predicament, I will argue that joyful gratitude — a sense that we have received goods that weren’t owed to us but that are essential to our very being — is at the heart of the Christian doctrine of creation.'<br />
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Professor Volf was educated in his native Croatia, the United States and Germany. He earned doctoral and post-doctoral degrees from the University of Tübingen, Germany. His most significant books include Exclusion and Embrace (1996), and Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World (2016). The main concern of his work is exploring the significance of the Christian faith for living flourishing lives as individuals and societies in pluralistic settings.