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)
I just finished the Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James — the first time, I think, I’ve read them all in one go, though over the years I’ve read most of them several times. James calls them “ghost stories,” though as far as I can tell only one of them (“A Neighbour’s Landmark”) features a ghost — if we...
Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005), we’re told, is “based on real events” but that should probably read “very loosely based on real events.” That was relatively clear when the movie was released but has become incontrovertible as time has gone by. I don’t want to get into any of that, though; indeed, I don’t want to...
Four Big Books is the title of a course I’ll be teaching this coming term — my last as a university professor! What follows is an outline of what I’ll be saying to my student on the first day of class. • • • • • Back in 1982, at the Cannes Film Festival, the German film director Wim Wenders brought other filmmakers,...
MINISTER: Who plays Christ? EDDIE: A kid we’re all very excited about, Todd Hocheiser, wonderful young actor we found in Akron, Ohio, in a nationwide talent hunt. But Hocheiser is seen only fleetingly, and with extreme taste…. We saw in a previous post how earnest Cecil B. deMille was about his religious beliefs....
By way of follow-up to this post: I’ve been able to publish so widely because I am always attentive to the character of the publishing house or periodical I hope to write for. What kinds of books and authors do they publish? What is their core audience? Whom do they hope to reach? I make sure that my pitches and/or...
In writing and publishing, I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been edited by men and women, by the non-binary and the trans; by the old, the young, the middle-aged; by liberal Catholics and trad Catholics, by mainline Protestants, by evangelicals, by hardline Anglican traditionalists and the Orthodox, by Muslims and Jews,...
That is Vida Chenoweth; the picture was taken when she was in the second of her three careers. Her first career was as a pioneer of the marimba as an instrument for classical music. Chenoweth may have been the first person to play the marimba in concert at Carnegie Hall, in 1959, when she performed the world...
EDDIE MANNIX: It’s a swell story – a story told before, yes, but we like to flatter ourselves that it’s never been told with this kind of distinction and panache. EASTERN ORTHODOX PATRIARCH: Perhaps, sir, you forget its telling in the Holy Bible. EDDIE: Quite right, Padre. The Bible of course is terrific. But for...
BAIRD WHITLOCK AS AUTOLOCHUS: This Hebrew is son of the one God, the God of this far-flung tribe. And why shouldn’t God’s anointed appear here, among these strange people, in this strange place? Here, Gracchus, in this sundrenched land. Why should he not take this form — the form of an ordinary man? A man bringing...
N. Ángel Pinillos asks, Why Are Humanists So Bad at Defending the Humanities? — and his answer is that humanists’ defenses of the humanities fail when they argue that the humanities have any kind of intrinsic, as opposed to instrumental, value. Now, Pinillos says that he happens to believe in the intrinsic value of...
In this piece on why he blogs, Noah Smith says that blogging has allowed me to inject ideas into the discourse with unparalleled speed, breadth, and access. A researcher goes deep into a few topics; a blogger can quickly hit the main points of many topics. This enables speed; academics might take months to write...
I just saw a Brit on BlueSky mocking “an actual respected American online news commentator” for pronouncing “Macron” to rhyme with “Ramone.” My first thought: Pronounce the word “Paris” for me. Likewise, one of the Guardian footy commentators was recently annoyed by a (supposed) American mispronunciation of Paraguay...
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