“Gratitude enlivens the world.” (Miroslav Volf) Gratitude is the emotional expression of the interchange of love between giver and receiver. So of course we’re looking for more of that in public—it’s the very evidence of giving to one another, grace with each other, beneficence for one another. In this conversation, Miroslav Volf and Evan Rosa discuss this remarkable interchange of love between giver and receiver that leads to gratitude. They discuss the meaning of gratitude in emotional, moral, and theological terms; and he introduces a variety of views on gratitude, from the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, to Thomas Aquinas, to Anthony Kronman’s “born-again pagan” critique of Christian gratitude, and finally Martin Luther’s take on gratitude which draws on the Magnificat of Mary, which Miroslav expounds. Special thanks to the Gratitude to God Project for helping to make this episode possible.
“Gratitude enlivens the world.”
Gratitude is the emotional expression of the interchange of love between giver and receiver. So of course we’re looking for more of that in public—it’s the very evidence of giving to one another, grace with each other, beneficence for one another. In this conversation, Miroslav Volf and Evan Rosa discuss this remarkable interchange of love between giver and receiver that leads to gratitude.
They discuss the meaning of gratitude in emotional, moral, and theological terms; and he introduces a variety of views on gratitude, from the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, to Thomas Aquinas, to Anthony Kronman’s “born-again pagan” critique of Christian gratitude, and finally Martin Luther’s take on gratitude which draws on the Magnificat of Mary, which Miroslav expounds.
Special thanks to the Gratitude to God Project for helping to make this episode possible.
Show Notes
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Miroslav Volf: Gratitude enlivens the world and makes it a site of presence of we, as Christians would say, of interchange of love between God and human beings, which is, really what we normally, in the best of homes, would experience, right? This is a site where this is a shared space. Uh, everybody's invested in that space, and when we come to a home, we are grateful for home. But that means we are grateful not just for stuff that's there, but for the environment that has been created in which we are present to each other and things are present to us that we mutually share and appreciate. And that kind of relationship is fostered by an attitude of gratitude.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. It's pretty fascinating just to look out at the world, sometimes public life, local community life, the media, whatever you are seeing as you scroll through your social media or, or consider the publics that you're a part of. Read culture a little bit. Interpret it. And I tend to do this around the holiday season. Maybe you do too. You can see all at once both the widespread seasonality of giving thanks. A public service messaging of positive psychology to keep encouraging us to be grateful to lift our spirits, to keep us happy, as well as what seems to be a pretty significant lack of gratitude in public life.
Too often, the thanks feels thin, like lip service or polite courtesies. It's one thing to choose to be grateful because it's adaptive, it somehow benefits us and leads to better personal outcomes, higher subjective well being, but it's quite another to genuinely, and dare I say rightly, feel gratitude because of some incredible gift that we've received, which goes right back to the public dimensions of gratitude: the interpersonal, relational, public, communal. It's absolutely essential in gratitude, because gratitude is about an interchange, something that bridges a divide, that makes its way from you to me. Gratitude is really the emotional expression of that interchange of love between giver and receiver. So, of course, we're looking for more of that in public, it's the very evidence of giving to one another, grace with each other, beneficence for one another.
And in this conversation, Miroslav Volf and I discuss this remarkable interchange of love between giver and receiver that leads to gratitude. We discuss the meaning of gratitude in emotional, moral, and theological terms, and he introduces a variety of views on gratitude. From the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector, to Thomas Aquinas, to Anthony Cronman's born again pagan critique of Christian gratitude, and finally landing on some beautiful reflections, in my opinion, of Martin Luther's take on gratitude, which draws on the Magnificat of Mary.
It's pretty fun to listen to Miroslav expound on this. Thanks for listening, friends, and from all of us at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, have a happy Thanksgiving.
Miroslav, thanks for joining me. We're going to talk about gratitude. I thought it might be good to start expressing a little gratitude ourselves.
Miroslav Volf: Let's do gratitude exchange.
Evan Rosa: A gratitude exchange, because, you know, the psychologists tell us that we're going to feel better if we express some gratitude.
Miroslav Volf: I'm grateful to you.
Evan Rosa: And I'm grateful for you as well. But really though, like what, what in your life is cause for a recognition of gift and gratitude right now?
Miroslav Volf: I have a wonderful daughter. I have a wonderful wife. I am healthy. I have a great place that I work, that I enjoy, folks that I enjoy being with. It's, it is, it is wonderful. I know that there are other things for which I am not grateful, but I think for me, it's partly also, what do I choose to concentrate on? And at what time? It seems to me that there's a kind of a self inflation of the negative.
Evan Rosa: I can identify with that. Yeah.
Miroslav Volf: And I'm trying to push a little bit back at that without disregarding what ought to disturb me and disturb us.
Evan Rosa: I am also grateful for my family, and I do find I'm grateful for sunny days. I'm so grateful for having a little one. There is the wonder and the surprise and just the amazement, the awe at all things. I think it's our children, honestly, that teach us gratitude so wonderfully well. But we came also to talk about a little more on the intellectual side as well, but I think it's a, it's an important distinctive for us that we want theology to make its way into life and a life that's worthy of our humanity. So I wanted to begin thinking about gratitude as a moral emotion with you, one that's regularly felt quite deeply, but also has this moral valence to it. What is it to get gratitude right, or what's up with that question, even, to feel gratitude rightly?
Miroslav Volf: Yeah, in some ways, uh, the question almost, given how we tend to think about gratitude, the question itself feels like it's off. What do you mean feel gratitude rightly? We're just grateful, right, for the good things, we identify the good things and we are just grateful, uh, for them. And I, I think that where the moral dimension comes in is precisely in this identification of the good for which we should be grateful, and maybe one can put it this way-
should one be grateful for anything that we experience as good in the moment, or is there a discernment that is necessary as we identify the good, so as to be able actually to be grateful for the good, and not to be grateful for something that might be really deeply problematic, but to be simply deemed to be good, that might make us feel good to be grateful for whatever it is that we are grateful, but we may be going significantly wrong.
Uh, I mean, a very good example is easy to find in Gospels, and it's the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector, and Pharisee standing before God and says to God, I thank you. And then he goes on to list what he's thankful for, that I am not like other people, thieves, rogues, and so forth, right? Now, that's a good thing, maybe, that he isn't, but behind that lies a despising look toward that tax collector who is one exemplar of a person who he's grateful not to be like. And it seems like there's something really off about that gratitude. Cases of this sort, I think we ought to pay more attention than we tend to do.
Evan Rosa: That is really a fascinating case. And I love, I really do like letting the scriptures kind of release some of the, maybe, the closed off psychology, you might say, of the figures of Scripture and open that up a little bit and to think about the, you know, the phenomenology, say, of feeling in that righteous mode.
On my reading, there's an interesting aspect to that Gospel passage where we can see, in that very case, the corruption of the pharisaical approach, right? The whitewashed walls, but that are really just tombs of death inside that feeling itself seems morally problematic. And so it's complicated by the fact that it seems like the Pharisee brings gratitude as a performance.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah. So there's kind of a performance and there's performance before God. There's performance before this tax collector. And in regard to tax collector, gratitude serves as a mode of putting somebody else down. And in all these ways, it's really problematic and it hides or it enacts in the same moment, as you said, death that is in inside hiding at the same time as a kind of look at me, not even, not even just whitewashed, right, he's screaming to be seen and to be seen as something that he's not, right.
Evan Rosa: It's almost as if the Pharisee brings himself before God as a gift, as maybe even like a kind of, and this is to prefigure a little bit of your take on gratitude, but to suggest that kind of performance, that kind of behavior is somehow a gift back to God is somehow a repayment and then some, to God as if God is, can be so satisfied by such behavior.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah. And then the thank you, God, that I'm giving you this gift now of self presentation as the one who in reality, isn't that how he sees himself. It's not just convoluted, but it's mutually intertwined and in a kind of perverse moral way, an expression of gratitude.
And what I was going to say, it is, this is an instant that we readily recognize, but often we are implicated in all sorts of problematic situations or benefit from problematic things, but without even thinking about how to disambiguate what we experience, we simply experience it because it is good for me, I can be grateful without any further thought. And this, I think, is what this story triggers in me a question mark and invites me to think about my acts of gratitude and integrity, which they have, or maybe do not have, or at least for me to be aware when I'm grateful that I'm grateful or good that ride also on some really problematic things that have happened or have problematic implications for other people.
Evan Rosa: The next move I was going to make here is: why does gratitude seem so important or so basic in spiritual life, one's relationship to God? And you can see it across a variety of traditions. One common thread, perhaps among many, but one deeply common thread is this posture of gratitude toward God. What do you think makes it so core to one's relation to God as an individual, as a creature, before God?
Miroslav Volf: So if we say, as monotheists do, that everything that exists owes its existence to God, that my own life also, therefore, I owe to God. And if one sees everything as exists and one's own life as in some way as a gift from God, it wouldn't be there, it wouldn't be here if God didn't create and we experienced the goodness of it, then I think it's appropriate to experience it also as a gift and therefore the appropriate response to a gift is a form of gratitude, and I think that's the most fundamental, I think, uncontested position of most people, that if you receive a gift, some form of gratitude is appropriate. And it would be especially appropriate if it is a gift of your own existence. That's why I think I'm old school here, we should be grateful to our parents for having brought us into the world, raised us, spent all these incredibly long, wakeful hours at the beginning of our lives, and many, many more hours and days of worries. Gratitude is appropriate. How much then more not to God, to whom we owe everything?
Evan Rosa: I want to put that in conversation with another widely held view of what gratitude is, and that's a repayment of a debt. I want to bring it up, especially in the light of a comment that you were making, I think appreciatively in many ways, but also critical, importantly, a widely shared attitude about gratitude that Kronman brings to us in his book, Confessions of a Born Again Pagan.
And you said, and I'm quoting you, if I may, 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 adherence, 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. So I want to talk about this predicament, because I think you can replicate that critique of Christianity, as basically laying too heavy a load, too heavy a burden on its adherents of needing to somehow pay back God.
And so I'm wondering if you can help unearth why that predicament might be there.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah, the Kronman is a very interesting case. And it's interesting because on the whole, he has an account of gratitude in which gratitude is not understood as a repayment, but gratitude is joyful acceptance of a gift that one receives, but he himself believes that there is then a kind of psychological necessity of a person who receives, or psychological pressure in a person who receives a gift. To give a new gift, not to be repayment for the old, but to give a gift that is commensurate, as great and as good as the one the person has received. And even though gratitude itself does not demand repayment, but it, it kind of places the person who's received, it has a feels obligation to reciprocate in equal measure.
And what happens psychologically when we receive gifts, he thinks that's possible within a life of people who are roughly equal. So you have to have a certain kind of equality to be able to do that, and Kronman advocates for equality between people so that they could return gifts of a corresponding kind.
But when it comes to God, the gift that God has given you first of creating you, second of dying on the cross for your sins, you have no chance of not repaying, but of giving equivalent gift to God, and suddenly you feel not elevated by the gift that you have received, but you feel completely diminished.
And out of this diminishment, he thinks, arises resentment. And that has qualified Christian history and Christian count of our relationship to God and to the world. It's a kind of a frustrated sense of being failing oneself, not good enough. And that I think results in his reading, it results in rebellion against God.
And he reads almost like the entire story of Christianity and cultural impact of Christianity, uh, through the lens of discomfort that Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost feels because he is obliged to be grateful for God, but he's not equal to God.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, you point out the abysmal gap that separates God and humans. I'm trying to represent Kronman's perspective; God is both too distant and too different from the creature. And it turns out to be he's suggesting that the Christian God demands this impossible gift in return.
Miroslav Volf: And I think he's wrong, not just with respect to, say, somebody like Luther, with whom I identify, and who has no obligation of return account of the gift, but I think he's misrepresenting also somebody like Aquinas, who operates with the idea of gratitude as repayment. Um, Aquinas would say gratitude requires kind of basically three things. First, we recognize that we have received a benefit. Second, we express thanks for it. So we speak and feel internally thankfulness, gratitude for it. And third, we repay the favor at a suitable place and time, and then he adds, we repay it according to our means. That is to say, the person who is repaying the gratitude doesn't need to repay the entire deed that would be due to be repaid if this was a borrowed sum, but he's repaying as much as that person has, and so you don't have a sense that humans, just because they're humans, can never... repay enough. And that's not just a feature of Aquinas's adjustment of gratitude to our relationship to God. That's also a feature Seneca has the same thing. I think most of the great theoreticians of gratitude would say, you know, a person who receives may not give as much as they have, but they have to, they will, if they are repaying, for those who advocate repayment, they do have a significant sacrifice in order to make up for what's needed. And what's needed in Aquinas' position is not just the gift that is as, in ideal case, that is as large as the one given, because something has not just been given to a person, but freely given, right? And so that your return gift has to have something of the excess, because you are repaying, but you have to repay for beneficence and the heart of the person giving you that other gift. And therefore, your gift has to be larger than the gift that you have received. Then Aquinas adjusts that for the, um... kind of character of the person who is the recipient of the gift.
Evan Rosa: Does it also take into account not just their character, but their circumstances that you said, according to the means that they have available? The reference I'm thinking of here is with respect to the greatness of the gift that the widow's mites gets identified with, right? That, that even such a small gift, because it came from such dire circumstances or such low means, there's a kind of greatness to it that is factored there.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah, that's a perfect example of what is meant so that even a greater return gift can be lesser if that person has greater means to give that gift. Yeah.
Evan Rosa: Let's talk about joyful recognition because we've talked a little bit about repayment of a debt, giving a gift in response. I want to hone in a little bit more on the, on, on joyful recognition as the form of gratitude that, that you're advocating for, and try to understand the place of, of the recipient, that a recognition of a gift and recognizing oneself, particularly as dependent on the goodness of that gift or in, or enjoying the goodness of that gift, perhaps.
Miroslav Volf: Well, to me, it seems that first thing that we have to do is we have to recognize that what we have received is in fact a gift, which means we were not entitled to it, or we are not obliged to do something with it. There are many different ways in which we might receive something, which isn't a gift. But when we receive a gift, it's important to recognize it, ah this is a gift. Recognize it as a gift. I think what we recognize also, when we receive a gift is a kind of moral worth of the giver on account of the moral worth of the deed. And the moral worth of the deed, they sacrifice, they gave something freely, not to benefit them, but to benefit somebody else, to benefit in this particular case, me.
I recognize that it's a gift. I recognize that it's a very good thing. And there are to the extent that they have given in such way to be recognized as worthy of, of admiration. And third, I received that gift, not with resentment or not with grumpiness, so it could have been bigger. It could have been better.
I received that gift with a measure of joy. And that's a kind of joy over the giver who gives, joy over the gift, joy over the situation in which gift giving is possible, so that the joy of gratitude spills over into a variety of relationships in which we are with that particular person who has given us a gift, and that I would describe then as gratitude, as joyful recognition.
Evan Rosa: So interestingly enough, another factor that Kronman brings to this scenario is laying quite a bit of this misconstrual of a Christian understanding of gratitude, this kind of impossible gift that God demands or expects. He lays it at the feet of Luther. And, and I know that from your perspective. Them's fighting words.
How can we rightly understand Luther's perspective on, on gratitude and, and where does he fit into your own take on joyful recognition?
Miroslav Volf: You know, Kronman is interesting on Luther because he highlights one aspect of Luther's thought and it's a very thick book. It's a doorstopper. I think about 1,100 pages and quite a bit on also on Luther there.
But the way I read that book is, so he emphasizes the nothingness of the self, which Luther does mention, and then this kind of sense of having received absolutely everything, but oneself being nobody, you are from Kronman's perspective, in an impossible situation in terms of adequately responding in his term with gratitude.
And I think it's just a misreading of Luther. And I think it's above all misreading of the... kind of fundamental nature of who God is, who in this particular case is the giver and, and what God then correspondingly requires of, of folks. And to me, the crucial for interpreting Luther as a whole, but crucial certainly in terms of interpreting Luther's idea of gratitude is his Heidelberg Disputation and the final thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation, which, which summarizes that whole text and that thesis goes, the love of God does not find
but creates what is pleasing to it. And he contrasts this love of God to human love or the way in which normally humans love, which is to look for what is pleasing and then attach oneself to the pleasing so as to benefit, uh, from, uh, from this. And for Luther, God does not seek good and does not love because he seeks something good from humans, but rather God bestows good on human beings.
So God's love is this gifts bestowing love. And I think the crucial second element is that for Luther, uh, absolutely no repayment is needed, and no repayment actually is acceptable. It's not that God just doesn't need any repayment, but actually that God does not want any repayment because that would misconstrue
the nature of God's love, because unlike sinful love, which seeks its own good, Luther said, God does not seek a good, does not seek return, and he puts it in his lectures on Galatians, which are also a wonderful text, one of his most beautiful writings, he says, for God is He who dispenses his gifts freely to all.
And then he adds, which I think is really marvelous, and this is the praise of his deity. That is to say that God gives freely gifts to people. And then he writes, but God cannot defend His deity against the self righteous people who are unwilling to accept grace and eternal life from Him freely, but want to earn it by their own works.
And then he says, they simply want to rob Him of the glory of His deity. In a sense, they fundamentally misconstrue God. I mean, I sometimes experience that, uh, you know, I want to give somebody a gift and they just want to repay me. And I think you're insulting me, but not wanting to take my, I want to give you a gift, forget about your repayment. It's, I don't want anything from you. I want to give you a gift, but don't think of me as somebody who just gives you so you can give me something back, don't think that I have want to capture you in some kind of relationship that you cannot control, which is what gifts often- people often do with gifts, right? That's why you have a saying, well, be afraid and be worried or suspicious of those who come bearing gifts because they'll want to take something from you. They'll put in one of your pocket something so that to take out of your something even more valuable out of your pocket. And people are obviously aware of that and therefore suspicious.
But if you have somebody who truly gives selflessly gifts, um, then it's a kind of insult to them if you want to treat them as if they were trying to get something out of you for that.
Evan Rosa: I could go into a long winded remembrance of Christmas gift exchanges from years past, wherein this precise problem is at play. But I will hold on that, I'll pause on that, and instead point out the connection back to the Pharisee and the tax collector, where it does in fact look in that case like the self righteousness of that Pharisee, as Luther is pointing out in this passage, does seem to intend to rob some of the glory of God.
It's a misconstrual of the relationship between the giver and the recipient.
Miroslav Volf: And misconstrual of the intention of the giver, and of the, in this particular case, character of the giver. People sometimes relate to, to God example that one can give which is very close to people's experiences, is the account of gift giving that Thomas Hobbes says, and he talks about gratitude as repayment, but he's, he makes a claim, which is crucial, and this is almost like a fundamental difference from Luther: he says that in all voluntary acts, and gift giving is by definition a voluntary act, the goal of every person, is their own good. So whatever I do voluntarily, I'm trying to get something good for me. I'm not trying to give you something to you, primarily. Or when I give something to you, I want to get something back.
And so in this kind of case, gratitude must be a form of repayment. On Hobbes account, gratitude must be a repayment, but also the person who is grateful, that person also wants to do something for himself, right? Um, that is to say, even the grateful one is not grateful just because, uh, they have been given a gift.
What they do is by honoring the benefactor, they want to dispose the benefactor. To keep giving them gifts. So gratitude function as almost a little bribe that we give, just like the gift was a bribe. Okay, I'll give you something in order to get something from you, but I'm grateful also so that I can, you can continue to giving it to me or I will repay you so that you will continue, uh, a benefaction to me.
And so there is this circle of mutual benefit that that is created and it's often circle in which the one who has power dominates, completely destroy the one who receives because he calls all the cards in his hands and Luther is pushing against that.
Evan Rosa: And it does look like it's a vicious cycle of almost feigned gratitude or feigned giving where the intention is so self interested that, and of course, that's what we get in the wake of Hobbes, state of nature, of life being such a nasty, brutish and short endeavor. But, but I do want to place that in a contemporary concern, which you yourself pointed out, which is, we don't live in times where the kind of love or gratitude that Luther is advocating is present in public life, that there seems to be that dearth that in our disenchanted world, as you put it, that there's not a lot of just the simple goodness of receiving a gift, a joyful recognition thereof in that public life.
And that's lamentable in so many ways.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah, and some of it that occurs is relatively superficial, right? And in that sense, to me, in terms of our relation to each other, but more broadly, in terms of our relation to the world, gratitude is fundamental if we are to have a positive relationship to the world so that the world is not simply either a dead thing, and that's really one difference between ordinary thing and a gift, right? You can have an ordinary thing that means very little, but if somebody takes it who is dear to you and gives it to you as a present, suddenly that thing becomes alive to you in a different way because there is a person behind and their attitude to you is symbolized by the gift that they have given to you.
And so the kind of sense of gratitude enlivens the world and makes it a site of presence of, we as Christians would say, of interchange of love between God and human beings, which is really what we normally in the best of homes would experience, right? This is a site where this is a shared space.
Everybody's invested in that space. And when we come to a home, we are grateful for home, but that means we are grateful not just for stuff that that's there, but for the environment that has been created in which we are present to each other and things are present to us that we mutually share and appreciate.
And that kind of relationship is fostered by an attitude of gratitude.
Evan Rosa: Another passage that informs deeply your own perspective on gratitude that comes from Luther comes from his commentary on the Magnificat, the Magnificat being this amazing song of Mary, wherein this humble young woman is calling on the powers of the world to be dethroned and kneeled before God and the relations there, like the relation, especially between humans and God, is I think how I would like to try to conclude our time here.
The way you, you express it is this. The alignment of God's love in creating the world out of nothing and God's love in elevating the presumed nobodies of the world. So I wonder if you would just read this passage and then offer a little bit of commentary on it.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah, this is a beautiful text. I think my favorite texts, maybe three of the shorter texts of Luther's, are Heidelberg Disputation that we mentioned and then Freedom of the Christian and Commentary on Magnificat, which is just a beautiful piece of writing.
And one of the things that he. emphasizes there, as in all of his writings, is this incredibly generous, gift giving character of who God is, particularly to those who are nobodies of the world. And so he writes, No one can love God unless God makes himself known to that person in the most lovable and intimate fashion.
And God can make himself known only through those works of his which he reveals in us, and which we feel and experience within ourselves. But where there is this experience, namely, that He is a God who looks into depths and helps only the poor, despised, afflicted, miserable, forsaken, and those who are nothing, there the hearty love for Him is born.
The heart overflows with gladness and goes leaping and dancing for the great pleasure it has found in God.
Uh, I, I find it, I find it absolutely extraordinary, and he begins this with the idea that he asked at the beginning of, of that Magnificat, uh, and this is very close to the beginning. He asked the question, well, who is God? God is the highest, and that's, he takes it from the Magnificat. He, Mary praises the God in the highest, and because he's the highest, uh, therefore, he says there is nobody above him, so God doesn't look up. There is nobody to the side because he's alone there. Where he, God, turns his eyes is below, which is where we are.
And so God is the one who, in humility, always reaches to that which is lower than God in order to lift it up. And that's how he comes to the nobodies, to the despised, which are... primarily the objects of God's love. And again, it's for the sheer pleasure of being generous that God gives to those who have the least lifting them up. And that becomes then for Luther, the model of Christian love. And it's not just for him a model in a sense, oh, here's what God does, now you do it as well. But he thinks that the fundamental relationship between God and humans is such that by faith, God becomes present in the person, and the image that he uses for that is the iron that has been made hot by the fire, and just as fire heats the iron, so also God's love and God's presence transform the self, and so we become messengers of God. Actually, God acts, Christ acts through us toward those who are despised, who are nobody's to lift them up for simple reason that God and we want to give them a gift.
Evan Rosa: This idea of inhabiting this position of the beggar, that God looks into the depths and helps only the beggar, only the poor, despised, afflicted, miserable, forsaken, and then that, just the incredible difference from night to day, going from those depths of beggarliness into leaping and dancing. For the great pleasure, that is a really beautiful expression of joyful recognition.
Miroslav, thanks for elucidating gratitude, bringing it into the light as joyful recognition and offering a really, like, just deeply attractive model for what gratitude and thankfulness can be.
Miroslav Volf: Thank you, and we ought to thank Martin Luther, in spite of all his... warts as I sometimes like to say, and he had quite a few. If you can just see past and not, not excuse, I, I don't, I would want to excuse his wartiness, but see past the, there's this incredible treasure that he brings because he's discovered in God, this absolutely incredible treasure.
Evan Rosa: Amazing. Thanks, Miroslav.
Miroslav Volf: Thank you.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologian, Miroslav Volf. Production Assistance by Macie Bridge. Special thanks to Robert Emmons, Pete Hill, and the Gratitude to God Project for helping make this episode possible. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu, where you can find past episodes and articles and books and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're new to the show, remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app, so you don't miss the next episode, and to our loyal supporters, we're always asking definitely in a spirit of gratitude, free to help share the show and welcome new people, new listeners into our community.
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