Wheaton College Announces the 2026–27 Core Book

Dr. Alan Jacobs’ Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind (Penguin Random House, 2021) is this year’s Core Book, selected for the ways it provides insightful guidance for engaging the past.

Now in its tenth year, the Core Book program invites students, faculty, staff, alumni, prospective students, parents, donors, and the local community to engage enduring questions through interdisciplinary responses to literature and storytelling. This motivation is grounded in the mission of Wheaton’s Christ at the Core curriculum, a distinctive general education experience marked by academic excellence and grounded in the person of Jesus Christ and his truth as revealed in the Scriptures.

Dr. Alan Jacobs’ Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind joins a rich lineup of literature, including Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air,and foundational Christian texts like Augustine’s Confessions. In BreakingBread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind,Jacobs provides guidance for engaging the past generously.

Jacobs, who taught literature at Wheaton for nearly 30 years, invites readers to travel to the past and join in table fellowship with various dinner companions. This practice allows the reader to encounter people who think differently from them and, as a result, grow in charity. Jacobs hopes that as readers learn to love their neighbors of the past, it will help them concretely love their neighbors of the present. He also believes that taking the time to step outside the present and engage with writers and works of the past will help readers gain much-needed perspective, think more clearly, and live more wisely in the present. Jacobs draws from a range of liberal arts disciplines, including fiction, poetry, drama, philosophy, and history, across many time periods.

“Breaking Bread With the Dead is full of rich resources for our community to consider in our contemporary context, which is marked by distraction, anxiety, preoccupation with the present, and polarization,” said Dr. David Lauber, who serves as Dean of Humanities and Theological Studies and Professor of Theology and is overseeing the Core Book program for the 2026–2027 academic year. “This book is ideal for our educational mission and campus ethos, as we read old books, engage the past with humility and generosity, open to learning from those who have gone before us so we can cultivate wisdom and discernment to live faithfully in our complex world.”

This year’s Core Book events include a talk by Dr. James Beitler, Director of the Wade Center, on how to read like C.S. Lewis, and a Wheaton faculty panel discussion on engaging the past from different academic disciplines. Other Core Book events, resources, and a reading guide can be found at wheaton.edu/corebook.

—Juliana Bacote