Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Hi, everybody, and welcome back to speaking

with joy. It is not often that you get to discuss the books you love with an author you revere, but that is exactly what I got to do in today's podcast.

In this episode, I talked with Dr. Alan Jacobs about his new book, Breaking Bread with the Dead, a reader's guide to a more tranquil mind.

Dr. Jacobs is what I want to be when I grow up, a humanities professor who writes

insightful books with delicious prose in his spare time. Having written over 15 books and

contributing regularly to places like the Atlantic and First Things, Dr. Jacobs has revived

the tradition of the Christian intellectual, helping people draw the lines between theology,

philosophy, and literature with what's happening in the world today. Today we talked about how old

books can bring us both wisdom and tranquility, and near the end, I even got to ask his thoughts

about my most recent literary obsession, Susanna Clark and her new book Pyrenezzi.

This conversation was as cozy and intellectually stimulating as a strong cup of Yorkshire gold tea.

I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

Interrogate the writings of the wise, asking them to tell you how you can get through life in a peaceable, tranquil way.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Speaking with Joy.

On today's show we're going to be exploring the benefits and perils of a reading life, of inviting the thinkers of the past to speak to

our present confusions, and the practices which can come to form our habits of thinking and living

and figuring out life. And I am so excited to invite a very fascinating, admirable figure who has spent a lot of his career, kind of helping

people enter into the thinkers and readers in the past and the practice of reading to chat

with me about that today.

And that is Dr. Alan Jacobs.

...