In Governing for the Long Term, Alan M. Jacobs investigates the conditions under which elected governments invest in long-term social benefits at short-term social cost. Jacobs contends that, along the path to adoption, investment-oriented policies must surmount three distinct hurdles to future-oriented state action: a problem of electoral risk, rooted in the scarcity of voter attention; a problem of prediction, deriving from the complexity of long-term policy effects; and a problem of ins...

There is a growing consensus in the social sciences on the virtues of research strategies that combine quantitative with qualitative tools of inference. Integrated Inferences develops a framework for using causal models and Bayesian updating for qualitative and mixed-methods research. By making, updating, and querying causal models, researchers are able to integrate information from different data sources while connecting theory and empirics in a far more systematic and transparent manner ...

Long celebrated for her heroic feat of endurance in escaping slavery and subsequent activism, Harriet Jacobs was also an astute political thinker. Her book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a remarkable philosophical text. It is one of the most insightful reflections, both on the nature of life as a slave, and on the relationships amongst slaves and between enslaved and free people. The author places Jacobs in the republican tradition of political thought. Bringing Jacobs into dial...

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 with 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. Jacobs shows how The Book of Common Prayer--from its beginnings as...

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 uptic...

"Absolutely splendid . . . essential for understanding why there is so much bad thinking in political life right now." **—David Brooks, New York TimesHow 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.**As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper’s, Alan Jaco...

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 consumin...

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. L...

The life and times of Milton’s epic poem about Satan’s revolt against God and humanity’s expulsion from paradiseJohn Milton’s Paradise Lost has secured its place in the pantheon of epic poems, but unlike almost all other works in the pantheon, it is intimately associated with religious doctrine and its implications for how we live our lives. For more than three centuries, it has been a flashpoint for arguments not just about Christianity but also about gov...

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. Through theological reflection interspersed with readings of literary texts (Shakespeare and Cervantes, Nabokov and Nicholson Baker, George Eliot and W. H. Auden and Dickens), Jacobs pursues an elusive quarry: the charitable reader.

Essayist and biographer Alan Jacobs introduces us to the world of original sin, which he describes as not only a profound idea but a necessary one. As G. K. Chesterton explains, "Only with original sin can we at once pity the beggar and distrust the king."Do we arrive in this world predisposed to evil? St. Augustine passionately argued that we do; his opponents thought the notion was an insult to a good God. Ever since Augustine, the church has taught the doctrine of original sin, ...

A landmark collection of 14 texts from the Nag Hammadi library that shed new light on the esoteric knowledge of Gnosticism—including the Gospels of Mary Magdalene, Thomas, and Judas, and The Sophia of Jesus Christ.Discover the intimate conversations between Jesus and his Disciples.In 1945, several gospels, hidden since the first century, were found in the Egyptian Desert at Nag Hammadi. This discovery caused a sensation as the scrolls revea...