I'm a writer at Esquire magazine, and the author of a new book about religion, spirituality, the Bible, rules, grace and what it's like to have a huge Moses-like beard.  It's called "The Year of Living Biblically"

I grew up with no religion at all -- as I say in the book, I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. Not very. But over the last few years, I've become very interested in religion. Especially since I have young kids and want to know how to raise them. I wondered, what was I missing -- if anything -- by being completely secular? So I decided to dive in headfirst and try to understand the Bible from the inside. To live it. To experience the world like my forefathers did, and see how it changed and enhanced my life.

I decided to try to follow every single rule in the Bible. I wanted to follow the famous ones: The Ten Commandments. Love thy neighbor. Tithe your income. Do not gossip or lie. But I also wanted to try to follow the lesser-known ones: Do not wear clothes of mixed fibers. Grow a beard. Stone adulterers.

The result was the most fascinating, revelatory and perspective-changing year of my life. I hope the book is entertaining, but the experience was also much more profound and filled with insights than I anticipated.

I've done several experiments with my life. My previous book was called The Know-It-All, and it was about how I read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z. I also wrote an article for Esquire called My Outsourced Life, about how I hired a team of people in Bangalore, India to live my life for me (they answered my emails, my phone, argued with my wife for me, etc.). But this was the most intense of all my experiments by far. And the most rewarding.

At the risk of breaking the biblical commandments against boasting, here are some links to some of the reviews, the Today Show appearance, my appearance on Conan O'Brien, etc.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY review
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/006/1.9.html

HEEB magazine review
http://www.heebmagazine.com/articles/view/108

TODAY SHOW appearance
http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-US&brand=msnbc&vid=07a39022-f3aa-49af-af34-012850792d0d

USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2007-10-07-jacobs-living-biblically_N.htm

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