You were told to live a meaningful life. But no one ever told you how. Our lives are shaped by contradictions. Competing voices tell us who to be, what to want, and how to live. The result? A fragmented moral imagination. Were handed a thousand broken messages and left to cobble together something resembling a life. But instead of clarity, we get exhaustion. Instead of wisdom, we get anxiety.This leaves you asking yourself How can I get through when I feel alone and confused? How can I live well in this broken and chaotic world? In To Live Well, Alan Noble shows you how you can not only endure but flourish in life. Through exploring the seven virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and love, youll learn how to choose gracefully, act justly, suffer steadfastly, live moderately, believe soundly, hope resolutely, and love rightly. This book wont give you a ten-step plan to fix everything. It doesnt promise clarity overnight. But it will invite you into something deeper: an ancient, time-tested path of habits of heart and mind that shape who we are and how we live.With honesty, theological depth, and a mentors heart, Noble names your confusion and offers an antidotenot by escaping the mess but by learning how to live faithfully within it. If youve ever longed for something solid in a world that just wants to sell you more temporary stuff, To Live Well is a good place to begin.
Dryness, paleness, waking, sighing, despair, frenzy, death: loves repercussions can be dire indeed. Perhaps that is why Robert Burton devoted the largest part of his pioneering 17th-century psychological work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, to this supreme passion. Edited to offer the modern reader easier access to this classic text, this abridged version preserves all the fantastic variety of the original, as Burton knits together stories and quotations drawn from millennia of European literature in order to understand loves causes, consequences, and cures.We encounter gods and goddesses, ancient kings and queens, lascivious monks and pure-hearted shepherds, marriages happy and unhappy, allurements natural and unnatural, and, most importantly, many cures for love-melancholy, from the obvious to the arcane. Intricate yet commonsensical, learned yet earthy, and twinkling throughout with ironic warmth, Burtons masterpiece speaks to the deepest concerns of the human heart as well today as it did four centuries ago.