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)
It’s interesting to juxtapose this WSJ story about people building “analog rooms” in their houses with Jason Fried’s account of his parents’ “smart home”: It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the art systems. You know, the ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT...
Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor: We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact — even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both...
I remember the precise moment I fell in love with Coventry Cathedral. It was on my first visit. As I entered I saw what you see above, which is quite wonderful in many ways. But after I had walked up towards the altar to inspect the great tapestry, I pivoted — and that’s when it hit me. It’s important to understand...
April 1, 2005, to John Gruber: John, I just wanted to write to thank you for Markdown, which is one of the coolest and most useful tools I’ve come across in a long time. I’m an English professor who does a lot of writing, and one of my frustrations over the years has been dealing with the various file formats of the...
A few days ago I submitted my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers to my editors at Oxford University Press. I always find this stage of the book-writing process emotionally complicated. At the moment, while I feel gratified that I have told my story, that I have taken this person in words from the cradle to the grave, I...
Like many (most?) Mac users, I keep my frequently-used applications arranged in my Dock in a logical and easily-remembered order; but a few months ago, my Mac stopped remembering that order and began to display those apps randomly. At first I thought they were displayed with the most recently opened on top — I keep...
Diarmaid MacCulloch: The particular appeal of Orthodoxy for a certain sort of young man comes from the fragility of so much of young American masculinity: disoriented by assertions of female equality and the new self-confidence of many people in their variations on gender and sexual identity. I have two questions....
Men in their latter years fall into three general types, which can to some degree overlap but are nonetheless distinct: Grumpy old men Explorers (“Old men ought to be explorers,” T. S. Eliot said, but this is not common) Wise elders Dan Treier would have been a wonderful wise elder, had he not died very prematurely,...
I just watched The Egyptian, a 1954 movie. It’s very interesting in a number of respects. It’s not good — the acting is almost uniformly poor, though Peter Ustinov is enjoyable as a roguish servant — but it’s interesting. The titular character is played by a little-known English actor named Edmund Purdom, and he is...
This story about a long-time Apple developer and writer who has been locked out of his account without explanation and without any means of redress has been making the rounds in Apple-user world. And he’s not the only one: scroll to the bottom of that post and you’ll see that the blogger, Michael Tsai, has covered...
Dorothy L. Sayers’s sequence of twelve radio plays, The Man Born to be King, happened because the BBC asked her to put the life of Christ, distilled from the Gospels, in dramatic form. But Sayers was not content simply to string together episodes: she wanted to make something thematically coherent and aesthetically...
What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do? – The Atlantic: But as a historian trying to comprehend feelings, [Rob] Boddice can’t stand those cute Inside Out characters. Because not only do we imagine other people to have the exact same set of emotions that we have, but we project this thought backwards...
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