The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World

Miroslav Volf is director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School. His other books include Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation.

"Existentially charged and disciplined, learned and readable, sophisticated and accessible, orthodox and open."
— Reviews in Religion and Theology

"The End of Memory is a book that had to be written. From many quarters in present-day society comes the cry, ’Remember the wrongs done to you.’ Miroslav Volf agrees with that cry but cogently argues that remembering wrongs can be done wrongly. With great learning and deep humane wisdom he reflects on how we can rightly remember the wrongs done to us. In all of Volf’s writing, theology illuminates life and life illuminates theology. Here this two-way illumination is at its very brightest."
— Nicholas Wolterstorff
author of Lament for a Son

"In this hauntingly autobiographical narrative, Miroslav Volf examines afresh the problems of abuse, memory, and reconciliation, and he concludes that memory, as such, cannot be adjusted to relieve our hurts. But forgetting, rightly understood, provides a healing balm. This is a book of profundity and wisdom, endowed with the authenticity of considerable personal suffering."
— Sarah Coakley
University of Cambridge

"Miroslav Volf, in reflecting on the vicissitudes of the late twentieth century, restores memory to its significant role in resolving conflict rather than in making ephemeral deals. In struggling with the question of hatred, he points to new directions in interfaith and interethnic dialogue, trust, and generosity at this early moment in the twenty-first century, already experienced as a time of eclipsed hope."
— Hillel Levine
International Center for Conciliation

"This unique book brings light into the dark labyrinth of human memory of wrongs suffered. . . . Miroslav Volf combines in an ingenious way his personal struggle with his own months-long interrogation as a Yugoslavian soldier under suspicion with probing psychological insights and theological reflections. His style is personal and inviting, and he is honest with himself and with God. This book is full of surprisingly novel and compelling insights. A masterpiece. . . . I know of no psychological or theological book that is as gripping."
— Jürgen Moltmann
University of Tübingen