Welcome to Kelly Corrigan Wenders. I'm Kelly Corrigan. Today, I am joined by one of my most impressive and inspiring friends, theologian Miroslav Volf. He is the director of the Yale Center for Faith in Culture, and he's here to help us continue

our hard conversation series. We're looking at how the very natural drive for superiority

makes genuine dialogue nearly impossible. Miroslav shares insights from his new book,

The Cost of Ambition,

how striving to be better than others makes us worse. We'll look at how competition

undermines connection in real life with people we love, and of course, across social media

and education and politics. It's a trap, this wanting to be better. And if and when we can

break free from it, relationships will transform. Here's my conversation with Miroslav Volf. Before you even get into this book, there's a C.S. Lewis quote that caught my eye and kind of broke my heart all at the same time.

It says pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

We say that people are proud of being rich or clever or good looking, but they are not.

They are proud of being richer or cleverer or better looking than others.

So we are inside a series about hard conversations,

and part of what it seems to me

makes human interaction so fraught is ego

and the desire to win,

the desire to best someone else.

And I just wonder, is this our nature? Like, is C.S. Lewis right?

Well, in some ways, I think it is our nature. It's our nature as social beings. We live our lives

in the eyes of others. And we want to have those lives to be

impressive. We want others to look up to us. And it can have all sorts of advantages to us.

And that's why I think that we have organized also,

I wouldn't say almost entirety, but a great deal of modern culture around competition. And we

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