To Live Well Cover Reveal and Pre-Order!

And how you can help out!

Photo by Joe Caione on Unsplash

The above image is not the cover of my new book, although perhaps having a puppy on the cover would sell quite a few copies. I just wanted to hide the real image until you clicked on the article. And now you have.

So here it is:

And you can now pre-order To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times at your favorite stores:

Hearts & Minds Books, InterVarsity Press, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.

As a reminder, here’s how I described this book last October while I was still working on it (note that at that time the working title of the book was “Re-Collecting Your Life”):

And as I said in my original post announcing the contract, the main image comes from (of course) T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land where the speaker answers the question, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” with “Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only /A heap of broken images.” In the modern and now contemporary world, society seems to lack the metaphysical grounding (the roots the clutch) that provided order, meaning, justification, purpose, values, belonging, and identity in the old world. In short, Christ. Our world is a world of “stony rubbish,” a spiritually dry and sterile world. For pre-conversion Eliot, modern people cannot say or guess what kind of metaphysical grounding might be possible in the modern world for one important reason: we have only ever known chaos. We have only ever known “A heap of broken images.” In the language of philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, we might call this “liquid modernity.” Everything is shifting under our feet, in chaos, in disorder, fragmented, broken up, in contention. And of course, this has only accelerated in our own moment. I fear that young people are inundated with conflicting, fragmentary messages about identity, sex, bodies, politics, truth, mental health, God, and everything in between. Eliot’s point here is that when you have only known fragments it’s difficult (if not impossible [it’s not impossible, but the poem implies it is]) to sort out how to live.

This book is about re-collecting those fragments, the fragments of our lives and putting them in order so that we can move through the contemporary world in a manner worthy of the gospel.

As I went around the country giving talks about Disruptive Witness and You Are Not Your Own, one of the most common questions I received was, “What am I supposed to do?” Which is a perfectly good question, but not one that I was focused on answering, particularly in YANYO. My focus was on social analysis, on exploring why the contemporary world feels so inhuman, not so much how to live in an inhuman world. Of course, I do address that question somewhat, but I primarily focus on the spiritual response: recognizing that we belong to God and acting accordingly. What I don’t do is offer much by way of practical advice. What does belonging to God practically look like? In many ways, To Live Well is an attempt at offering that practical advice. It responds to the question: how do we live in an environment which assumes that we are our own and belong to ourselves? How do we honor God and thrive in an inhuman environment? That’s what re-collecting the fragments looks like: figuring out how to act rightly.

In striving to answer this question for myself, I was led to the work of Thomas Aquinas scholar Josef Pieper and his two books, Faith, Hope, Love and The Four Cardinal Virtues. Between these two books, Pieper walks through the seven traditional virtues recognized by the church. He offers definitions, explanations, philosophical and spiritual implications, and commentary by Aquinas and other Church Fathers. What I found immensely valuable in Pieper was that he took these classical ways of pursuing human fullness (which is roughly the definition of the virtues: that which brings us closer to how God designed us to be), and made them real and alive. And I saw in these virtues answers for questions like, what is justice? in a society that is wrestling over social justice. And what is love? in a society confused about the definition of love. And what is temperance? in a society addicted to smartphones and adverse to chastity. Pieper, in short, became what Charles Taylor was for me in Disruptive Witness and what Jacques Ellul was for me in You Are Not Your Own, the brilliant scholar whose abstract philosophical work I could help translate for readers and apply to an immediate contemporary context. Naturally, my old friends Taylor and Ellul make an appearance in this book as well. But Pieper is my guide.

The goal of this book is to offer a practical guide to life for those who feel restless and confused about how to live in the contemporary world, which describes most of us. It isn’t a list of do’s and don’ts. But it does offer principles based off of timeless virtues that will help guide our thinking on complex issues. I hope it will be the kind of book one would give to a college student or anyone struggling with direction or feeling overwhelmed with this world. Each chapter discusses the challenges to practicing a virtue in our current context, defines the virtue, and gives practical applications.

I would deeply appreciate each of you sharing the pre-order links with friends and family and on social media. Each pre-order is a massive signal to the Powers That Be that this book is important to the Almighty Algorithm. I know we’re a long way off before April 28th, but it’ll be here before we know it (I hope). If you can do your part and pre-order and encourage others to pre-order, it would mean the world to me.

This project has been a labor of love and sacrifice for three years. I have learned a lot in the process, and I believe it will help a lot of people. I hope you can help me in this journey.

Thank you,

Alan