Alan Jacobs

The life and times of Milton's epic poem about Satan's revolt against God and humanity's expulsion from paradise John 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...

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....

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...