How to Think is a contrarian treatise on why we're not as good at thinking as we assume - but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life.

Most of us don't want to think, writes the American essayist Alan Jacobs. Thinking is trouble. It can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is slow, and that's a problem when our habits of consuming information (mostly online) leave us lost in the echo chamber of social media, where speed and factionalism trump accuracy and nuance.

In this clever, witty book, Jacobs diagnoses the many forces that prevent thought - forces that have only worsened in the age of Twitter, such as "alternative facts," and information overload. He also dispels the many myths we hold about what it means to think well. (For example: it's impossible to "think for yourself.")

Drawing on sources as far-flung as the novelist Marilynne Robinson, the basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, the British philosopher John Stuart Mill and the Christian theologian C.S. Lewis, Jacobs digs into the nuts and bolts of the cognitive process, offering hope that each of us can reclaim our mental lives from the whirlpool of what now passes for public debate.

After all, if we can learn to think together, perhaps we can learn to live together.

The "Upanishads" are the sacred writings of Hinduism. They are perhaps the greatest of all the books in the history of world religions. Their origins predate recorded history, being revealed to the Rishis of the Vedic civilization some 5000 to 10,000 years ago. Many see them as the kernel of the mystical, philosophical truths that are the basis of the Higher World religion of Hinduism, their cradle, of which Buddhism is a successor and Judaism is an offshoot. With Islam and Christianity being offshoots of Judaism, this makes them the foundational documents for understanding and practising religion today. Much of the original text of the "Upanishads" is archaic and occasionally corrupted, but it does convey a moral and ethical thrust that is abundantly clear. Alan Jacobs uses modern free verse to convey the essential meaning and part of the original text. He omits Sanskrit words as far as possible and the commentary provided is contemporary rather than ancient.

"At a time when many Americans . . . are engaged in deep reflection about the meaning of the nation's history [this] is an exceptionally useful companion for those who want to do so with honesty and integrity." -Shelf Awareness From the author of How to Think and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, a literary guide to engaging with the voices of the past to stay sane in the present W. H. Auden once wrote that "art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise, Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the strange and wonderful writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present-and increase what Thomas Pynchon once called our "personal density." Today we are battling too much information in a society changing at lightning speed, with algorithms aimed at shaping our every thought-plus a sense that history offers no resources, only impediments to overcome or ignore. The modern solution to our problems is to surround ourselves only with what we know and what brings us instant comfort. Jacobs's answer is the opposite: to be in conversation with, and challenged by, those from the past who can tell us what we never thought we needed to know. What can Homer teach us about force? How does Frederick Douglass deal with the massive blind spots of America's Founding Fathers? And what can we learn from modern authors who engage passionately and profoundly with the past? How can Ursula K. Le Guin show us truths about Virgil's female characters that Virgil himself could never have seen? In Breaking Bread with the Dead, a gifted scholar draws us into close and sympathetic engagement with texts from across the ages, including the work of Anita Desai, Henrik Ibsen, Jean Rhys, Simone Weil, Edith Wharton, Amitav Ghosh, Claude Levi-Strauss, Italo Calvino, and many more. By hearing the voices of the past, we can expand our consciousness, our sympathies, and our wisdom far beyond what our present moment can offer.

How do we stand in relation to everything that comes down to us from the past? Is the very idea of tradition still useful in the wake of historical ruptures, such as the Holocaust, changes in the canon, and the end of colonialism? The concept of tradition has gained renewed importance in recent cultural studies. Suspicion of tradition as culturally narrow and oppressive is a persistent theme of modernity and has increased lately with the resurgence of religious traditionalism around the globe. At the same time, various groups demanding recognition for their distinctive cultural identity have reclaimed their traditions. Philosophers from Josiah Royce and Hans-Georg Gadamer to Alasdair MacIntyre have explored the relations between tradition and themes such as freedom, community, self-assertion, originality, and the shared values and interpretations that constitute everyday life. The essays in this volume offer varying, even disparate analyses of religious, literary, and cultural traditions and both responses and resistance to them in a variety of philosophers, novelists, and theologians. They examine works by Gadamer, Royce, MacIntyre, Plato, Jacques Derrida, Charlotte Bronte, S'ren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edith Wharton, Chinua Achebe, John Fowles, Heinrich Bsll, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cotton Mather, Thomas Kuhn, Mikhail Bakhtin, Donald Davidson, Antebellum African-American women preachers, and Christian and Jewish thinkers in the wake of the Holocaust.

If the whole of the Christian life is to be governed by the ?law of love??the twofold love of God and one's neighbor?what might it mean to read lovingly? That is the question that drives this unique book. Jacobs pursues this challenging task by alternating largely theoretical, theological chapters?drawing above all on Augustine and Mikhail Bakhtin?

The "Bhagavad Gita" is a sacred scripture of epic dimensions and is the key sacred text of Hinduism. It means the "song of God" and is often called the "Song Celestial". Alan Jacobs uses contemporary free verse based on innovative metaphors to provide a clear meaning for today's readers. It is mandala poetry - each verse being a mandala for meditation.

ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover Award Our written words carry weight. Unfortunately, in today's cultural climate, our writing is too often laced with harsh judgments and vitriol rather than careful consideration and generosity. But might the Christian faith transform how we approach the task of writing? How might we love God and our neighbors through our writing? This book is not a style guide that teaches you where to place the comma and how to cite your sources (as important as those things are). Rather, it offers a vision for expressing one's faith through writing and for understanding writing itself as a spiritual practice that cultivates virtue. Under the guidance of two experienced Christian writers who draw on authors and artists throughout the church's history, we learn how we might embrace writing as an act of discipleship for today-and how we might faithfully bear the weight of our written words.

How The Book of Common Prayer became one of the most influential works in the English language While many of us are familiar with such famous words as "Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here. . ." or "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," we may not know that they originated in The Book of Common Prayer, which first appeared in 1549. Like the words of the King James Bible and Shakespeare, the language of this prayer book has saturated English culture and letters. Here Alan Jacobs tells its story. He shows how The Book of Common Prayer-from its beginnings as a means of social and political control in the England of Henry VIII to its worldwide presence today-became a venerable work whose cadences express the heart of religious life for millions.

If the whole of the Christian life is to be governed by the "law of love"--the twofold love of God and one's neighbor--what might it mean to "read" lovingly? That is the question that drives this unique book. Jacobs pursues this challenging task by alternating largely theoretical, theological chapters--drawing above all on Augustine and Mikhail Bakhtin--with interludes that investigate particular readers (some real, some fictional) in the act of reading. Among the authors considered are Shakespeare, Cervantes, Nabakov, Nicholson Baker, George Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Dickens. The theoretical framework is elaborated in the main chapters, while various counterfeits of or substitutes for genuinely charitable interpretation are considered in the interludes, which progressively close in on that rare creature, the loving reader. Through this doubled method of investigation, Jacobs tries to show how difficult it is to read charitably--even should one wish to, which, of course, few of us do. And precisely because the prospect of reading in such a manner is so offputting, one of the covert goals of the book is to make it seem both more plausible and more attractive.

By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear that the Allies would win the Second World War. Around the same time, it also became increasingly clear to many Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic that the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. A war won by technological superiority merely laid the groundwork for a post-war society governed by technocrats. These Christian intellectuals- Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others-sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world. In this book, Alan Jacobs explores the poems, novels, essays, reviews, and lectures of these five central figures, in which they presented, with great imaginative energy and force, pictures of the very different paths now set before the Western democracies. Working mostly separately and in ignorance of one another's ideas, the five developed a strikingly consistent argument that the only means by which democratic societies could be prepared for their world-wide economic and political dominance was through a renewal of education that was grounded in a Christian understanding of the power and limitations of human beings. The Year of Our Lord 1943 is the first book to weave together the ideas of these five intellectuals and shows why, in a time of unprecedented total war, they all thought it vital to restore Christianity to a leading role in the renewal of the Western democracies.

When it was first published in 1947, "The Age of Anxiety"--W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem--immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom on New York's Third Avenue, Auden's analysis of Western culture during the Second World War won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins. Yet reviews of the poem were sharply divided, and today, despite its continuing fame, it is unjustly neglected by readers.

This volume--the first annotated, critical edition of the poem--introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs's introduction and thorough annotations help today's readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden's most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.

Although there are major differences in the lifestyles of the numerous Native American nations, they share fundamental beliefs. The spiritual wisdom of these people is based on a love and reverence for Nature, a belief in a Supreme Being and a spirit world that interacts with human activity. Organized in alphabetical order and grouped around the main Native American Nations from Apache to Zuni, including the Sioux, Eskimo, Cherokee and many more, the evocative words that Alan Jacobs has selected from all the major tribes express the love and respect they feel for their environment and our place within it.

"For the Time Being" is a pivotal book in the career of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. W. H. Auden had recently moved to America, fallen in love with a young man to whom he considered himself married, rethought his entire poetic and intellectual equipment, and reclaimed the Christian faith of his childhood. Then, in short order, his relationship fell apart and his mother, to whom he was very close, died. In the midst of this period of personal crisis and intellectual remaking, he decided to write a poem about Christmas and to have it set to music by his friend Benjamin Britten. Applying for a Guggenheim grant, Auden explained that he understood the difficulty of writing something vivid and distinctive about that most cliched of subjects, but welcomed the challenge. In the end, the poem proved too long and complex to be set by Britten, but in it we have a remarkably ambitious and poetically rich attempt to see Christmas in double focus: as a moment in the history of the Roman Empire and of Judaism, and as an ever-new and always contemporary event for the believer. "For the Time Being" is Auden's only explicitly religious long poem, a technical tour de force, and a revelatory window into the poet's personal and intellectual development. This edition provides the most accurate text of the poem, a detailed introduction by Alan Jacobs that explains its themes and sets the poem in its proper contexts, and thorough annotations of its references and allusions."

In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way.
In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices.
Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.

In this lucid and balanced treatise, Alan Jacobs reveals the true parameters of Auden's change after his move to America in 1939. By carefully examining poems that represent transitional moments in Auden's thinking, he demonstrates the steady qualities of thought and expression found throughout Auden's poetry and shows how, in great art, as in great minds, change and continuity may powerfully coexist.

This second book in the trilogy picks up right where H.I. TECH left off. Something is alive inside Object Alpha Bell Tower. Dr. Kay Waterstone senses its presence in the unexplained terrors stalking the remote complex. In her nightmares, she feels the unworldly force seeking her. But Dr. Kay can do nothing as long as she remains the prisoner and unwilling accomplice of the hideous Victor Rykoff. And Rykoff is not heeding her warnings. He thinks events are firmly in his hands, and he's dealing the cards with cruel precision. His own scientific team is preparing to enter Object Alpha Bell Tower to harvest the ultimate terror weapon. And his mole, planted among Dr. Tech's CIA escorts, is oiling the jaws of a perfect trap. On their own, H.I. and April must begin to confront their own past and journey toward a horror far worse than Rykoff. Object Bell Tower's mysterious core may not be the control center of an alien spacecraft, and its crew may not be missing. The life inside Bell Tower is more powerful and more indestructible than any force on the planet. Like Dr. Kay, H.I. senses it. And he too suffers recurring nightmares roamed by a powerful presence that is a harbinger to the end of all life on Earth. Even as H.I., Dr. Kay, and April try to grapple with the mystery, the loud alarms at Crash Site Alpha Bell Tower begin to scream containment failure. Doc's Rules continues the action started in H.I. Tech. It too is an electrifying thriller with the scientific know-how of Michael Crichton, the military technology of Tom Clancy, and the spy stuff of Ian Fleming, Doc's Rules tripled the action and heart-pounding suspense as it escalates to new levels everything that is careening toward a global catastrophe. The first book in the trilogy, H.I. Tech, is also available on Amazon.

We have a new star on the literary horizon. M. Alan Jacobs' first book is a world-changing meteor of a story; fast, furious and brilliant. Unraveling Jacob's fantastic and highly dangerous mysteries is H.I. Tech, a 16-year old genius plucked from surburbia and dropped into one of the most frightening scenarios mankind may one day face... This is as good as it gets and Jacobs is just getting started. -Terry Moore (Strangers In Paradise, Echo) It's July 1999. Yale astronomer Raymond Marsden's discovery, RM 1999, is closing on earth, and Marsden thinks its impact will spell the end of the world. But instead of destroying the earth, RM 1999 survives its impact deep in the Amazon basin. All life around it dies, and RM 199 lies waiting in a massive crater of its own making, hidden from sight by conditions that seem to defy the laws of physics. Reclassified Object Alpha Bell Tower, RM 1999 is quarantined by special forces and probed by the best minds. But soon contact with their remote site is lost, Raymond Marsden vanishes, and events snowball toward Hippocrates Isaac Tech, a 16 year old outcast and reluctant prodigy. H.I. Tech may be an outcast, but he is not alone. If he were, he might have a shot at the ordinary life he desperately wants. He might even have a chance with April Waterston, who hates his guts. But this life is not to be. H.I.'s father is Dr. Jules Verne Tech, "Doc" to H.I. and "scientifi c trouble-shooter" to his bosses in the Pentagon. Doc never says no and never goes on a job without H.I. But before Doc's mission to the Amazon can begin, kidnappers target April. It seems she and H.I. share more in common that she can stand. Her mother, Dr. Kay Watersone, was in charge at the Bell Tower site. So now H.I.'s mission is personal. Save April. But it's not so easy, because she still hates his guts, and Doc's CIA escorts may be playing a double game. What awaits them all is a human horror beyond their worst fears and a powerful presence that is not of this world. H.I. TECH is the first book in a trilogy. It's an electrifying thriller with the scientific know-how of Michael Crichton, the military technology of Tom Clancy, and the spy stuff of Ian Fleming. H.I. TECH pushes the action and attitude to eleven, careening toward global catastrophe with pulse-pounding glee. The second book in this trilogy, Doc's Rules, is now available on Amazon.

LIFEFORM is the final installment in the H.I. Tech series and picks up where DOC'S RULES left off. It takes the readers into a face to face confrontation with the unknown alien force inside Object Alpha Bell Tower. Dr. Waterstone thinks she's found the horrible truth behind the destructive presence that Victor Rykoff has forced her to free. How can it be a mere virus? Microbes don't think, and a mere virus could not have manipulated the electronic defenses at the scientific site or probed its computers or invaded H.I.'s and Dr. Waterstone's nightmares. Dr. Kay believes that something even more threatening is emerging. Bell Tower's alien crew is not dead or missing. The supposed virus is the alien crew. Or is it? Perhaps it's a collective intelligence born from bacteria in a far away nebulae and capable of building a spaceship. Perhaps it is a perpetual wanderer. Maybe it has a purpose, because in its grasp is the genetic code for all life forms in the universe. Including all life on Earth But to the hideous fiend, Victor Rykoff, the alien lifeform is the basis for the ultimate terror weapon. And with the help of Russian renegade pilot, Vasili Putin, Rykoff is prepared to unleash the alien's terrible power upon the world. It seems there is no one who can stop him, because too much of the outcome rides on CIA agent, Alex Malone. She has a history no one could have known. Maybe Dr. Tech isn't coming to the rescue either. He and Dr. Waterstone have their own surprising history. So the survival of the world may depend on one unlikely hero or the other. Maybe a sixteen year old outcast named H.I. Tech or a street smart rebel named April Waterstone. All of them rush toward their destinies and a confrontation with a powerful alien presence, even as an American nuclear strike closes in. But it is the alien presence that is far beyond anything Dr. Waterstone has imagined. It is very much alive and nearing a frightening mission of its own. "Readers expecting the usual bug-eyed alien creatures that can either be cleverly destroyed or turned away by logic won't find them here," Jacobs says. He hopes his readers are instead totally caught by surprise. The entire "H.I. Tech" series weaves elements of mysteries and thrillers with the scientific know-how of Michael Critchton, the military technology of Tom Clancy, and the espionage intrigue of Ian Flemming. He hopes that the unique combination of an adolescent narrator, real technology, advanced science and evil villains makes his works a favorite among his readers.