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
Top Words
- excerpt
- against
- condition
- christians
- pynchon
- quotations
- hope
- done
- sent
- folder
- fantasy
- history
All posts (116)
As I reported in January, Arsenal broke me. It was the loss at home to Man Utd. that did it. I didn’t feel that I cut my ties to the club so much as that my ties were cut, in some involuntary yet definitive way. I still don’t fully understand it, but it has a lot to do with being a senior citizen, I suspect: I was...
This is a very strange essay. Alex Rosenberg writes that narrative history “fails to explain anything because it attributes causal responsibility for the historical record to factors that contemporary neuroscience reveals to be fictions — convenient ones, but fictions nonetheless.” The causal factors narrative...
This is my Week of Complaining, I think. I do so laughingly — laughing to keep from crying, to be sure, laughing bitterly, but hey, I’m laughing. All teachers, I think, are shaped by our experiences as students. We remember what we liked, what we hated, and what confused us, and we determine our policies and...
On 6 January of this year I submitted the complete text of my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers to the editors at Oxford University Press, including the editor of the Spiritual Lives series, my friend Timothy Larsen. Tim promptly returned to me a list of queries and corrections, which I responded to, also promptly. It...
One season into ST:DS9 and am trying to decide whether to continue. The season concluded with the straightforward message that (a) Science is Good, (b) Traditional Religion is Evil (not merely intolerant but murderous), and (c) Revisionist Religion is … Not Great But Acceptable, Whatever, We Can Sorta Work With It....
Religion and the Right to Be Left Alone – Avatans Kumar: Some of these faiths teach that spiritual experiences transcend sectarian boundaries and aren’t limited to one faith. Key Hindu beliefs illustrate this idea: Hinduism holds that many paths access one underlying Truth. The Rig Veda, Hinduism’s oldest text,...
Last night one of my students sent me this screenshot with the message “You were right, Dr. Jacobs!” I’ve never used Canvas, because I despise it even when it’s working as designed. Some of my students tell me that I’m the only professor they have ever had who does not use it, which makes me sad: the ed-tech...
In a famous episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Darmok” — an episode I previously wrote about here — Captain Picard finds himself trying to communicate with Dathon, the captain of an alien vessel whose mental framework is incomprehensible to that of Picard and, indeed, the entire Federation. Dathon’s people...
Ross Barkan: The culture … does get stuck. We are too backward-facing already. The Metropolitan Review has run its fair share of retrospectives, but I’ve been in the mood, of late, to crack down on them. There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art. There is always another famous dead...
I’ve read an enormous amount about Operation Market Garden (AKA the Battle of Arnhem) and while the actual operation was enormously complex — it could be thought of as a dozen distinct battles happening simultaneously — the broad outlines, it turns out, are quite simple. As is widely known, the ideas was to capture...
Colin Kidd: Harvey C. Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard from 1962 until his retirement from teaching in 2023 at the age of 91, has never shirked any opportunity to burnish his reputation as a conservative ogre. His interventions in the campus culture wars have been plentiful, memorable and clumsy. One...
Justin Neuman: At the start of a session, I might pull a trick from my meditation or yoga practice and say, as we’re opening our computers, that I know how tempting it is to check our carts, our socials, our text messages. I feel the pull, too. But for the next ninety minutes, we’re scrubbing in [like surgeons...
Page 4 of 10