A concise guide to "wrestling" with older books and why it matters. While some of this reads like the layman's version of Jacobs' denser work A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, which lays the foundation for an Augustinian vision of reading as a means of increasing our charity, Breaking Bread with the Dead builds on this argument by discussing the dangers of having a narrow "temporal bandwidth" due to social media.

We are bombarded with news cycles and trends, all of which either focus on the present or the future (an incomplete one at that because we project much of our blindspots on to the future). We refuse to associate ourselves with much of human history due to its prejudices, conscious or unconscious. This neglect limits our inability to think outside of our present time and makes for a pretty boring, isolated, and thin vision of life. There is so much to gain from wrestling with the past.

Of course, Jacobs is quick to admit that the past is filled with views so different than ours that many will find them offensive. This may be why Jacobs never discusses the "Western Canon" at all in this book (!): people who glorify the past are just as bad as people who neglect it, but it is in attending carefully to our forefathers and mothers that we find both what to do and what not to do.