Decisions about Decisions

Practical Reason in Ordinary Life

Cass R. Sunstein

Here is the most fundamental question in human life: How do we decide how we decide? We make such decisions all the time. If you trust your doctor, you might decide to follow a simple rule for medical decisions: Do whatever your doctor suggests. If you like someone a lot, and maybe love them, but are not sure whether you want to marry them, you might do this: Live with them first. Some of these strategies are wise. They prevent error. They improve your emotional well-being. Some of these strategies are foolish. They lead you in the direction of terrible mistakes. They prevent you from learning. They might make you miserable. Drawing on and revising previously published essays, Decisions about Decisions explores how people do, and should, make decisions about decisions. It aims to see what they are, to explore how they go right, and see where they go wrong.

At a glance

• Explains how people make decisions about decisions

• Explains when people refuse to believe something, or refuse to know something, because it will made them upset or sad to believe or know it

• Explains when people should rely on algorithms, and should not rely on algorithms

• Explains a host of puzzles in ordinary life and in politics

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway. He is the author of dozens of books, including How Change Happens, #Republic, Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, The World According to Star Wars, and the New York Times bestseller, Nudge

Gospel Thrillers Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible

Andrew S. Jacobs

What if the original teachings of Jesus were different from the Bible’s sanitized ‘orthodox’ version? What covert motivations might inspire those who decide what the text of the Bible ‘says’ or what it ‘means’? For some who ask conspiratorial questions like these, the Bible is the vulnerable victim of secular forces seeking to divest the US of its founding identity. For others, the biblical canon suppresses religious truths that could upend the status quo. Such suspicions surrounding the Bible find full expression in Gospel Thrillers: a 1960s fictional genre that endures and still commands a substantial following. These novels imagine a freshly discovered first-century gospel and a race against time to unlock its buried secrets. They also reflect the fears and desires that the Bible continues to generate. Andrew Jacobs reveals, in his authoritative examination, how this remarkable fictional archive opens a window onto disturbing biblical anxieties.

Andrew S. Jacobs is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Editor of the Elements of Religion in Late Antiquity (published by Cambridge University Press), and the writer and coeditor of five previous books, he is in addition author of Epiphanius of Cyprus: A Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity (2016), which in 2017 was awarded the Philip Schaff Best Book Prize from the American Society of Church History.

At a glance

• Introduces readers to a persistent but little-studied genre of fiction centered on ‘lost gospels’ and conspiracy theories

• Outlines how the Bible has become an object of conspiratorial thinking in US politics and culture since the mid20th century

• Explains how ‘discovery’ played a role in the foundations of modern biblical studies and continues to act as a constructive and disruptive force even today