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Alan Jacobs Biography

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“What do we choose it imagine, when we choose? The answer is always revelatory, which is one of the reasons Chesterton was right to say that 'the simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious people play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important.' The Harry Potter books remind us of this, and they can be, if we read them rightly, both a delight in themselves and a school for our own imaginings. They have many flaws, but I have not dwelt on them here because I forgive J.K. Rowling for every one. Her seven books are, and thank God for it, always on the side of life. (The Youngest Brother's Tale)”

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Book:Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant
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“(I am particularly fond of the latter model [i.e., the tree-filled residential squares of London]. which you can see followed in a lovely way in Chicago's Washington Square Park, the city's oldest. The Newberry Library sits on the north side of the square, and one of the great delights of using that excellent library involves sitting at a table and gazing through tall windows at the park's trees. Of course, this means that you don't get much work done and feel guilty later, but life consists mainly of such tradeoffs.) (The Life of Trees)”

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Book:Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant
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“(With perhaps pardonable exaggeration, Auden remarked of Kierkegaard that one 'could read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.') And for Auden this deficiency is properly described as theological: Kierkegaard, and other Christian thinkers who share his disregard for embodied human nature, neglect clear and vital Christian teaching about God's redeeming love for this physical world, this whole Creation. (The Poet's Prose)”

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Book:Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant
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“Much later in his life, Auden would borrow a musical metaphor from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and say that Kierkegaard was a 'monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament -- in his case, the theme of suffering and sacrifice -- but is deaf to its rich polyphony.' And for the Auden who emerges in the pages of this volume [Prose, Volume III: 1949-1955], the unique power of Christian doctrine is its polyphonic character, its capacity to address every dimension of our being, to give a comprehensive account of how history and nature relate, and -- decisively in Christ's incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection -- how they may be reconciled. (The Poet's Prose)”

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Book:Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant
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“As a spirit, a conscious person endowed with free will, every man has, through faith and grace, a unique 'existential' relation to God, and few since St. Augustine have described this relation more profoundly than Kierkegaard. But every man has a second relation to God which is neither unique nor existential: as a creature composed of matter, as a biological organism, is related by necessity to the God who created that universe and saw that it was good, for the laws of nature to which, whether he likes it or not, he must conform are of divine origin. And it is with this body, with faith or without it, that all good works are done. (W.H. Auden) (The Poet's Prose)”

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Book:Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant
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“When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather VINDICTIVENESS. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.”

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Author:Alan Jacobs
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“The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions.”

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Book:The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
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“Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefl y by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.”

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Book:The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
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“We should affirm the great value of reading just for the fun of it. . . . In my experience, Christians are strangely reluctant to take this advice. We tend to be earnest people, always striving for self-improvement, and can be suspicious of mere recreation. But God doesn’t just create, he takes delight in his creation, and expects us to delight in it too; and since he has given us the desire to make things ourselves—has allowed us to be “sub-creators,” as J. R. R. Tolkien says--we may rightly take delight in the things that we (and others) make. Reading for the sheer delight of it—reading at whim—is therefore one of the most important kinds of reading there is.”

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Book:The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
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“When we talk today about receptiveness to stories, we tend to contrast that attitude to one governed by reason - we talk about freeing ourselves from the shackles of the rational mind and that sort of thing - but no belief was more central to Lewis's mind than the belief that it is eminently, fully rational to be responsive to the enchanting power of stories.”

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Book:The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis
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“Objections to Christianity... are phrased in words, but that does not mean that they are really a matter of language and analysis and argument. Words are tokens of the will. If something stronger than language were available then we would use it. But by the same token, words in defense of Christianity miss the mark as well: they are a translation into the dispassionate language of argument of something that resides far deeper in the caverns of volition, of commitment. Perhaps this is why Saint Francis, so the story goes, instructed his followers to "preach the Gospel always, using words if necessary." It is not simply and straightforwardly wrong to make arguments in the defense of the Christian faith, but it is a relatively superficial activity: it fails to address the core issues.”

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Book:The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis
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