David Brooks - The Second Mountain

From the venue:

Location: 
Peachtree Presbyterian Church
3434 Roswell Road Northwest
Atlanta, Georgia 30305 
Website

Peachtree Presbyterian Church welcomes New York Times columnist and best-selling author David Brooks as the inaugural speaker for the Pentz Speaker Series. The Pentz Speaker Series is designed to bring leading Christian thinkers to inform and inspire those in the Atlanta area to live for Christ in the complexity of today’s culture.

Brooks will talk to us about his incredible new book, The Second Mountain. Come explore what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-centered world. Books will be available for purchase, and David will be on hand for signing. This event is free and open to the public, so be sure to register and save your spot. The first 500 people who register will receive a complimentary copy of The Second Mountain.

About the Book

Everybody tells you to live for a cause larger than yourself, but how exactly do you do it? The bestselling author of The Road to Characterexplores what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-centered world.

Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain.

And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment.

In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.

In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it’s also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process, we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.

About the Author

David Brooks is one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators. He is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and appears regularly on “PBS NewsHour” and “Meet the Press.” He is the bestselling author of The Road to Character; The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement; Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There; and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.