Core Book

What is Core Book?

Each year, the College selects a "core book." This book is chosen because it embodies and illuminates important themes of Wheaton's Christ at the Core general education curriculum. Throughout the year, we read, discuss, reflect, and learn together about the book and its themes. Our faculty, students, and staff work together to create materials to accompany readers. And we host Core Book events such as scholarly lectures, panel discussions, theatrical performances, film showings, reading groups, concerts, and more.

Who Reads the Core Book?

Everyone! All students, faculty, and staff are invited to participate in the conversation. We also invite local community members as well as the wider public to take advantage of Core Book resources and events. The Core Book program fosters a shared experience across the Wheaton community and beyond as we read, reflect upon, and discuss the book together.

Why Breaking Bread with the Dead?

This is a self-help book that will actually do us some good!

Alan Jacobs’s Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind is the fruit of years of reading and teaching. Dr. Jacobs taught literature at Wheaton College for just shy of 30 years, and since 2013 he has served as the Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University.

This book provides insightful guidance for engaging the past generously, open to learning things that our present moment cannot offer. Our day-to-day life is marked by frantic movement, information overload, and the incessant churn of news cycles. This often leaves us restless, agitated, and exhausted. Jacobs makes the case that reading old books is genuinely good for us and will provide us with calm and tranquility, which are hard to come by in our chaotic and accelerated age. By taking the time to get out of the present and engage writers and works of the past, we gain much needed perspective so we can think more clearly and live more wisely in the present. Jacobs draws from a range of liberal arts disciplines – novels, poetry, drama, philosophy, history, social science–and from across many time periods.

Jacobs invites us to travel as guests to the past and join in table fellowship with all kinds of dinner companions. Traveling as a guest to the past allows us to encounter and deal with people who do not think the way we do, and this helps us grow in charity. His hope is that if we can do this with people from the past, then we can do this with people in the present, and this will strengthen our common life together. Some of the writers we read are our friends, yet all of the writers we read are our neighbors. Loving our neighbors of the past will help us concretely love our actual and virtual neighbors of the present. Jacobs guides us in how to avoid nostalgic idealization of persons and writings from the past that we love, while also refraining from an easy and quick dismissal of persons and writings we hate, or at least think we should hate.

The Core book program invites you to take up and read – silence your social media and news notifications, or better, turn off your iPhone and shut off the WiFi. Hold the book in your hands and join Alan at the table–wrestle with his readings of old books, compile your own list of old books, and break free from our claustrophobic present and enter into the rejuvenating expanse of the past.