Books by Alan Noble
To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times
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. We're 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, you'll learn how to
choose gracefully,
act justly,
suffer steadfastly,
live moderately,
believe soundly,
hope resolutely, and
love rightly.
This book won't give you a ten-step plan to fix everything. It doesn't 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 mentor's heart, Noble names your confusion and offers an antidote—not by escaping the mess but by learning how to live faithfully within it. If you've 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.
On Getting Out of Bed:The Burden and Gift of Living
Christianity Today Award of Merit
Meditations on Why Life is Worth Living
We aren't always honest about how difficult normal human life is.
For the majority of people, sorrow, despair, anxiety, and mental illness are everyday experiences. While we have made tremendous advancements in therapy and psychiatry, the burden of living still comes down to mundane choices that we each must make—like the daily choice to get out of bed.
In these pages, you'll find
Alan Noble's deeply personal yet universally relatable consideration of the unique burden of everyday life,
Insight that offers hope and challenge without minimizing the reality of ordinary suffering, grief, and mental illness, and
Noble's ultimate conclusion that the choice to carry on amid great suffering—to simply get out of bed—is itself a powerful witness to the goodness of life, and of God.
You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World
The Gospel Coalition Book Awards Honorable Mention
“You are your own, and you belong to yourself.”
This is the fundamental assumption of modern life. And if we are our own, then it's up to us to forge our own identities and to make our lives significant. But while that may sound empowering, it turns out to be a crushing responsibility—one that never actually delivers on its promise of a free and fulfilled life, but instead leaves us burned out, depressed, anxious, and alone. This phenomenon is mapped out onto the very structures of our society, and helps explain our society's underlying disorder.
But the Christian gospel offers a strikingly different vision. As the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, "I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ." In You Are Not Your Own, Alan Noble explores how this simple truth reframes the way we understand ourselves, our families, our society, and God. Contrasting these two visions of life, he invites us past the sickness of contemporary life into a better understanding of who we are and to whom we belong.
Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age
We live in a distracted, secular age. These two trends define life in Western society today. We are increasingly addicted to habits—and devices—that distract and "buffer" us from substantive reflection and deep engagement with the world. And we live in what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls "a secular age"—an age in which all beliefs are equally viable and real transcendence is less and less plausible. Drawing on Taylor's work, Alan Noble describes how these realities shape our thinking and affect our daily lives. Too often Christians have acquiesced to these trends, and the result has been a church that struggles to disrupt the ingrained patterns of people's lives.
But the gospel of Jesus is inherently disruptive: like a plow, it breaks up the hardened surface to expose the fertile earth below. In this book Noble lays out individual, ecclesial, and cultural practices that disrupt our society's deep-rooted assumptions and point beyond them to the transcendent grace and beauty of Jesus.
Disruptive Witness casts a new vision for the evangelical imagination, calling us away from abstraction and cliché to a more faithful embodiment of the gospel for our day.