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)
Existing biographies of Bob Dylan are not what they claim to be. Instead, they tell the life story of one Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941, and raised in the nearby town of Hibbing. When, twenty years later, Robert Zimmerman moved to New York City and became a professional musician — first a...
All functional approaches to the investigation of myths – in terms of their social, cognitive or emotional values – have arguably a common epistemological foundation. They all imply, if they do not explicitly assume, that the language of myth is translatable into a “normal” language – which means, into one which is...
Brad East: The gospel does not promise you health. It does not promise you wealth. It does not promise you anything in this life except the person and work of Jesus. You may or may not get married; you may or may not have children; you may or may not live long; you may or may not live well. You may suffer trials,...
I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead! — Lesslie Newbigin To hope radically is to see the new possibilities for human flourishing where none seemed possible before. […] Radical hope, as I have been defining it, involves a deep confidence that there is a way of living...
When classes ended in May, I was with my wife in the hospital, so I couldn’t wrap up my classes appropriately. Instead, I recorded brief audio lectures. Below you’ll find a transcription (with links added) of the lecture I sent to my class on Fantasy. I have resisted the temptation to clean it up, to nuance my...
I see that The Rest Is History has recently done a series on what happened at Gallipoli in 1915, which as it happens is one of my obsessions. This isn’t a post about that campaign as such, but about two related things. ~ 1 ~ The assault on Gallipoli was, of course and infamously, Winston Churchill’s idea. Its abject...
I’ve bought a year of the Pro plan. At the end of that year I will do a thorough reassessment, and will not renew unless I can (a) identify significant ongoing needs, (b) continue to believe that Anthropic is not quite as corrupt as the other AI kaiju, and (b) reconcile my use with the energy and water demands of...
Antón Barba-Kay: AI is not “inherently evil” in the sense that it can be used exclusively to bomb and oppress. But not even nuclear weapons or machine guns work that way. We are never caused to do anything by a tool (or a narcotic). There is therefore no trade-off between using Claude and “reading stories to a...
A beat is a repeated sequence of percussive effects. A groove is an extended engagement with time. It takes certain musical skills to construct a good beat, but that’s a job you can outsource to a machine. There’s a different kind of musicality at work in a groove: you have an extended and ever-negotiated...
My friend Edward Mendelson knows more about Auden than anyone ever has, and probably more than anyone ever will. Certainly he knows far more about Auden than I do. Keep that in mind through what follows. Some years ago Mendelson wrote an essay about Auden’s secret acts of kindness and charity, an essay that contains...
I don’t mean to compare myself in any serious way with a major thinker like Rowan Williams, but in his new book, Solidarity: The Work of Recognition, he is working on exactly the same problem that I have been working on in recent years: how to restore (or create!) a sense of a common humanity. But he is trying to do...
Sean Keilen’s Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts may be the best book about liberal education that I’ve ever read. Keilen maintains throughout the book a double focus. Focus one is Shakespeare’s portrayal of scholars in three plays, and the lessons they must learn about the relationship...
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