As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper's, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America's culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us - political, social, religious - Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we're doomed to be divided, but because the people involved simply aren't thinking.

The White Witch, Aslan, fauns and talking beasts, centaurs and epic battles between good and evil: these have become a part of our collective imagination through the classic volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia. Yet who was the man who created this world? This audiobook attempts to unearth the making of the first Narnian, C. S. Lewis himself.

By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear the Allies would win the Second World War. Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic thought the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. 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.

C. S. Lewis had one of the great minds of the 20th century. Many know Lewis as an author of fiction and fantasy literature, including the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. Others know him for his books in apologetics, including Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. But few know him for his scholarly work as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. What shaped the mind of this great thinker?

With dizzying social transformations in everything from gender to social justice, it may seem like there's never been a more tumultuous period in history. But a single year in the late 18th century saw a number of influential transformations—or even revolutions—that changed the social trajectory of the Western world. By understanding how those events influenced today's cultural landscape, Christians can more effectively bear witness to God's truth in a post-Christian age.

Your brain is the most essential organ in your body. The brain and spinal cord are intimately connected to every bodily system and organ, so when it is balanced everything in your body and mind will function more efficiently. It's vitally important to take proactive steps now, or you risk losing everything, including your ability to think clearly, be creative, remember details, solve problems and retain your memory.

Millions have read books and listened to sermons by Timothy Keller. But who impacted his own thinking, and what shaped his spiritual growth and ministry priorities? With full access to Keller's personal notes and sermons—as well as exclusive interviews with family members and longtime friends—Collin Hansen takes listeners behind the scenes of one of the 21st century's most influential church leaders.

Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions—from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles—that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before.

Acclaimed author Karen Swallow Prior examines evangelical history, both good and bad. By analyzing the literature, art, and popular culture that has surrounded evangelicalism, she unpacks some of the movement's most deeply held concepts, ideas, values, and practices to consider what is Christian rather than merely cultural. The result is a clearer path forward for evangelicals amid their current identity crisis—and insight for others who want a deeper understanding of what the term "evangelical" means today.

Ella Baker, Alice B. Toklas, Hannah Arendt, Octavia Butler, Agnes Varda, Elizabeth David, Edna Lewis, Maya Angelou, Laurie Colwin: these smart, engaging, revolutionary, and creative twentieth-century women were all profoundly influenced by their own relationships to food, drink, and other elements of sustenance.

Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us.

Most people don't get intentional about their lives until they face a crisis and are forced to make changes. In Choose to Win, Tom Ziglar reveals a plan for taking action now, for beating the status quo and building the life listeners have dreamed about and deserve. Ziglar believes anyone can achieve massive change without massive upset. Making one small choice at a time through a sequence of easy-to-follow steps helps build lives that are more productive, more fulfilling, and more meaningful.

Combining the best current medical knowledge with a new approach grounded in integrative medicine, Chopra and Tanzi offer a groundbreaking new model of healing and the healing system, one of the main mysteries in the mind-body connection. The Healing Self is a breakthrough audiobook in self-care for a wide audience. Immunity - the body's ability to ward off disease - can no longer be taken for granted.

This audiobook edition will spark your creativity—and most importantly, help you see the world anew. Through a series of simple and playful exercises—131 of them—Walker maps ways for you to become a clearer thinker, a better listener, a more creative workplace colleague and finally, to rediscover your sense of passion and to notice what really matters to you.

Since its publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land - from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.

Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” ( Dallas Morning News). Here, combining more than 40 years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction. A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone, and immense gift for storytelling.

Written 200 years after Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln shared a birthday on February 12, 1809, this insightful account sheds new light on two men who changed the way we think about the meaning of life and death. Award-winning journalist Adam Gopnik's unique perspective, combined with previously unexplored stories and figures, reveals two men planted firmly at the roots of modern views and liberal values.

Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.

A provocative and positive response to Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and other New Atheists, Good Without God makes a bold claim for what nonbelievers do share and believe. Epstein's Good Without God provides a constructive, challenging response to these manifestos by getting to the heart of Humanism and its positive belief in tolerance, community, morality, and good without having to rely on the guidance of a higher being.

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.

No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.

By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear the Allies would win the Second World War. Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic thought the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. 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.

From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.

Have you ever wondered…whether God exists? whether life has meaning? Whether pain and suffering have a purpose? This audiobook is my invitation to sit down with C. S. Lewis and me to think about some of the persistent questions and dilemmas every person faces in life. We’ll explore Lewis’s thoughts on everything from friendships to heaven, from the reasons for faith to the power of stories.

In a major work of scholarship both erudite and very funny, Jeremy Dauber traces the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from Biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing his book thematically into what he calls the seven strands of Jewish comedy - including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar - Dauber explores the ways Jewish comedy has dealt with persecution, assimilation, and diaspora through the ages. He explains the rise and fall of popular comic archetypes such as the Jewish mother, the JAP, and the schlemiel and schlimazel.

The religious turn to their faith to find meaning. But what about the many people who lead secular lives and are also hungry for meaning? What guides, what approaches are available to them? Distinguished philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explain that a secular life charged with meaning is indeed within reach.

Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon.....

In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.

Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexis de Tocqueville, inform our political consciousness or discussing how beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.

The Art of Inventing Hope offers an unprecedented, in-depth conversation between the world's most revered Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, and a son of survivors, Howard Reich. During the last four years of Wiesel's life, he met frequently with Reich in New York, Chicago, and Florida - and spoke often on the phone - to discuss the subject that linked them: both Wiesel and Reich's father, Robert Reich, were liberated from Buchenwald death camp on April 11, 1945. What started as an interview assignment from the Chicago Tribune evolved into a friendship and partnership.

As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper's, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America's culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us - political, social, religious - Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we're doomed to be divided, but because the people involved simply aren't thinking.

By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear the Allies would win the Second World War. Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic thought the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. 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.

This book helps listeners develop practices that will result in deep, formative, and faithful reading so they can contribute to the flourishing of their communities and cultivate their own spiritual and intellectual depth. The authors present reading as a remedy for three prevalent cultural vices—distraction, hostility, and consumerism—that impact the possibility of formative reading. Deep Reading provides resources for engaging in formative and culturally subversive reading practices that teach listeners how to resist vices, love virtue, and desire the good.

The White Witch, Aslan, fauns and talking beasts, centaurs and epic battles between good and evil: these have become a part of our collective imagination through the classic volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia. Yet who was the man who created this world? This audiobook attempts to unearth the making of the first Narnian, C. S. Lewis himself.

Sita Dulip has missed her flight out of Chicago. But instead of listening to garbled announcements in the airport, she discovers a method of bypassing the crowds at the desks, a nasty lunch, whimpering children, their punitive parents, and the blue plastic chairs bolted to the floor: she changes planes—literally. Sita discovers entire planes of existence and visits societies not found on Earth—bizarre societies that share similarities with Earth's cultures and sometimes open doors into the alien.

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.

Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song. In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he's come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past.

Welcome to the age of behavioral addiction - an age in which half of the American population is addicted to at least one behavior. We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millennial kids spend so much time in front of screens that they struggle to interact with real, live humans.

In The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen investigates the cultural and emotional shifts that accompany our embrace of technology. In warm, philosophical prose, Rosen reveals key human experiences at risk of going extinct, including face-to-face communication, sense of place, authentic emotion, and even boredom. Considering cultural trends, like TikTok challenges and mukbang, and politically unsettling phenomena, like sociometric trackers and online conspiracy culture, Rosen exposes an unprecedented shift in the human condition, one that habituates us to alienation and control.

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a "full empty", something goes wrong.