What It's About
What It's About
What It's About
What It's About
How to Human is a tender and irreverent take on one of life’s most fundamental questions: how to be a better human. If you’ve ever wondered how to live well in a world dead set on making life hard on you, this is the book for you.
With nearly a decade of experience as a college chaplain, Alice Connor offers sage wisdom and no-nonsense realism that strikes right at the rashes and rubs of human life. She’ll tell you what you need to hear and encourage you to embrace doubt, failure, ambiguity, and vulnerability. How to Human will help you see life as an experiment—not a quest for the right answers. It’ll also help you take the right things seriously and not sweat the stuff that doesn’t matter.
Being a better human means practicing kindness, honesty, and self-awareness. How to Human invites you to consider that there are other possibilities than the most obvious; there are other ways of being human than what we’ve always done.
All of this is difficult, but becoming a more caring human is also one of the most joyful, satisfying, and necessary things we can do. So, let’s get to it.
Reviews
Reviews
Reviews
Reviews
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We need Alice Connor’s calm, vulnerable wisdom to help us cross the deep chasms that are tearing our world apart—to learn to be curious about those with whom we disagree, to take them seriously, to listen intently. But there is nothing ponderous and heavy about How to Human. It is bright, funny and a pleasure to read. My first thought when I finished reading it was that I couldn’t wait to give it to my daughter who is in college. My second thought was that I wanted to keep it close to remind me that it is okay to muddle through imperfectly.
—Debbie Blue, author of Consider the Women and Sensual Orthodoxy.
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Harper Lee once said that while many receive advice, only the wise profit from it. These days, however, not many people (and especially young people) are receiving much advice (and especially good advice) in the first place. Useless information? Sure. Polarizing rants? You bet. Dehumanizing clickbait? Hard to avoid. Genuine guidance, however, drawn from a lifetime of careful reflection and thoughtful people-loving and broken down into specific, actionable baby steps…well, that stuff is mighty hard to find, which is why Alice Connor’s How to Human is a true gift. I mean that literally; this is a book you should read quickly and then give away, preferably to someone who’s not yet sure of themself and maybe doesn’t have enough help. Because Alice is a LOT of help, both to the students she mentors here on campus and to anyone wise enough to take in the goodness she's poured out on these pages.
—Bart Campolo, humanist chaplain at the University of Cincinnati and podcaster at Humanize Me.
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Alice Connor offers up a recipe book for life based on the collected wisdom of her community of college students. These deeply personal stories create a space where it is ok to ask questions, to be your weird self, and to figure out how we respond to the world (and other people) together. Connor invites the reader into the spiritual practice of not knowing. This is one of those books you buy for someone else but read it yourself first. Her provocative writing is relevant to not just college students but to anyone trying to figure out how to be a human being who makes mistakes but is still abundantly loved and transformed by our experiences together. I loved it.
—Aaron Billard, Unvirtuous Abbey
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How to Human is a lively and authentic discourse drawn upon Connor's experience of interacting with the vulnerabilities of human experience. Her insights and recommendations speak to the need and the means of overcoming the stubborn obstacles to becoming fully human. How to Human is at once an enjoyable read that also challenges us to address the uncomfortable dimensions of our life. The payoff is well worth it.
—Seamus Carey, President, Transylvania University
Excerpt
Excerpt
Excerpt
Excerpt
Please enjoy this excerpt from How to Human about failure. It’s good news, I promise.