The Homebound Symphony
Alan Jacobs
I am — let me take a deep breath — the Jim and Sharon Harrod Endowed Chair of Christian Thought and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University. I’ve been at Baylor for eleven years and before that taught for three decades at Wheaton College in Illinois. I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. I’ve been married for forty-four years and have a grown-up son. I am an Anglican Christian.
August 2026
September 2026
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All posts (116)
Mark Liberman: For decades, people have been worrying about declines in literacy rates, and even steeper declines in how many people read how many books, especially among students. For a striking recent example, see Niall Ferguson, “Without Books We Will Be Barbarians”, The Free Press 10/10/2025 — that article’s...
Last month, when I was suffering from a vertigo and unable to read for more than a few seconds at a time, my constant companion was the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald, and especially her four great Songbooks: Gershwin, Ellington, Cole Porter, and Rodgers & Hart. Collectively they constitute, I believe, one of the...
I wrote in my anarchist notebook: Jacques Ellul thinks that Christians should be anarchists because God, in Jesus Christ, has renounced Lordship. I think something almost the opposite: it is because Jesus is Lord (and every knee shall ultimately bow before him, and every tongue confess his Lordship) that Christians...
Phil Christman has said that Adam Roberts, Francis Spufford, and I form a kind of writerly school — though he has yet to define its parameters. I kinda hope he does that one day. UPDATE: Phil has written firmly to me: Now, listen here — I did not call you and Adam and Francis a […]
At Evangelical Colleges, A Revival of Repentance – The New York Times (1995): Students at evangelical colleges are embracing a revival calling them to repent. “We haven’t seen a student revival since the Jesus movement days of the late 60’s and early 70’s,” said the Rev. John Avant, pastor of a Baptist church in...
Two weeks ago I entered mortal combat with Covid, and have emerged victorious but not unscathed. This bout featured an unexpected symptom: persistent vertigo, especially when looking at text. Not a great situation for someone in my line of work! (And with my personal preferences.) But if I kept my computer screen at...
What people do in response to violence is consolidate the myths they live by. This focuses emotion and fosters solidarity, but it also renders people susceptible to control by non-human forces, submission to which, in times of crisis, looks like virtue. I’ve written a lot about all this. See: “Wokeness and Myth on...
The starting point for my friend Tim Larsen’s new book The Fires of Moloch is another book, one published in 1917 and often reprinted over the next few years. The Church in the Furnace is a collection of essays by Anglican clergymen who served in the Great War as military chaplains. The chaplains were sometimes...
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