Should we still bother with the supposedly great works of past ages? Aristotle believed that men were naturally superior to women. Kant wrote that 'Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites.' The Founding Fathers declared it 'self-evident' that all men are created equal, but nevertheless owned slaves. Small wonder that many readers prefer to close the book on the past. Rather than dwell amid the squalor of history, shouldn't we focus our attention on hopes for a better world?The literary scholar Alan Jacobs hears you. He gets it. But you're wrong. In a scintillating work that weaves together the Book of Genesis and Thomas Pynchon, the Roman poet Horace and Simone Weil, Jacobs shows how our encounters with the past in all its disturbing strangeness may be our best chance at winning a measure of mental freedom.
Examines the forces that prevent modern people from thinking, including distraction, social bias, and fear of rejection, and offers tips to regain a rational mental life.
Jacobson-Widding reminds us, for example, that throughout sub-Saharan Africa a “funeral is a complete inversion of prescribed and normal social behavior. The hierarchical order, controlled behavior, and the prudish etiquette of normal ...
Nicholson Baker's book U and I, concerning his youthful obsession with John Updike, is a funny but also touching account of this kind of connection. Baker would cry out in pleasure after reading one of Updike's famously lapidary ...
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 ...
Jacobs 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 ...
Presents a collection of essays and book reviews covering a variety of topics in religion, philosophy, and literature.
In this collection of nonfiction stories, Gelman includes many of her own adventures as well as essays by writers and readers all celebrating the connections they've made through food and travel.
Eucherius of Lyons surmised that “although God is present everywhere, and regards the whole world as his domain, we may believe that his preferred place is the solitudes of heaven and of the desert.”37 For Abba Andrew, the three.
Traces the life of the twentieth-century Christian literary master, drawing on themes from the Narnia series to offer insight into Lewis's experiences, from his work as a medieval scholar to his role as a beloved children's book author.
"The Arsonists' City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan's hands, one family's tale becomes the story of a nation--Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States.