How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

As an academic, a celebrated Christian thinker, and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper's, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to multiple communities that often clash in America's culture wars. But in his time spent navigating the big issues that divide us--political, social, religious--Jacobs has learned that most of our fiercest disputes occur because the people involved simply aren't thinking.
     Most people don't want to think. Thinking is trouble. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with our like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is slow, and that's a big problem when everything about the way we consume information (mostly online) leaves us lost in the spin cycle of social media, partisan outrage, and instant gratification.
     In this smart, endlessly entertaining, and deeply important book, Jacobs diagnosis the many forces that act on us to prevent thinking--distraction, social bias, fear of rejection--forces that have only worsened in the age of Trump. He also dispels the many myths we hold about thinking. For example:
It's actually impossible, as the saying goes, to "think for yourself." We are always thinking with, or in opposition to, other people.Thinking well doesn't mean suppressing one's feelings in favor of cold rationality. It's about joining our analysis and feelings to produce an adequate response to our world.Drawing on sources as far-flung as novelist Marilynne Robinson, basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and Christian theologian C. S. Lewis, Jacobs digs into the nuts and bolts of the cognitive process, offering hope that each of us can regain control of our mental lives from the information overload that plagues us all. Because if we can learn to think together, maybe we can learn to live together, too.