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)
Preface: For a hundred years now devotees of Sherlock Holmes have been playing the Great Game, a hermeneutical exercise based on the premise that the Holmes stories are not fiction but rather absolutely reliable historical records. Therefore any inconsistencies in the stories must have an explanation, however...
I read everything, or very nearly so, that my friend Adam Roberts publishes, online or in print, so when I read this post by Adam I immediately checked to see if indeed I did respond — and in most cases I did. One of Adam’s essays in particular, this post from 2017, now strikes me as particularly important, and my...
Long-time readers know of my love for and commitment to the open web: sites with no intervening platform, no paywall, just sitting there on the World Wide Web in plain HTML which cats and dogs can read! (Allusion alert.) My buddy Austin Kleon — with his 300k Substack subscribers — teases me about this. This is me in...
As regular readers of mine know, I have long been a big fan of The Rest Is History podcast: I joined the Club as a Friend of the Show within weeks of its inception. But in the last year or so the show has, or so it seems to me anyway, been declining in quality. Earlier episodes were typically informed either by the...
A wonderful essay in the new issue of Hedgehog Review, and a welcome reminder of how much better reading in print is than reading online: the beautiful high-resolution photography, the excellent typography and layout, the complete absence of flickering ads, pop-ups, notifications from other tabs or other apps. How...
Now that I’m writing for The Dispatch, I’m re-acquainting myself with what it’s like to have comments on my posts. I learned the Iron Laws of the Comments Section many years ago, and only need to refresh myself. In a general-interest publication — as opposed to a personal blog, where people behave somewhat...
Paul Kingsnorth’s Writers Against AI campaign asks writers to make the following three pledges: I will not use AI in my work as a writer. I will not support writers who use AI in their work. I will support writers, illustrators, editors and others in related fields whose work is entirely human-made. I think I...
Probably many people have said this before, but it just occurred to me this past week as I have been teaching the dialogue under discussion. The Platonic dialogue that we call the Republic bears the Greek title Πολιτεία (Politeia), which Allan Bloom suggests might best be translated Regime — or, periphrastically,...
There are some terrific episodes in ST:TNG season 5, but more than anything else this is The Season When Worf Gets in Touch with His Feelings. This happens over the course of several episodes, primarily through Worf’s interactions with Troi — and yes, I know they become an item later on. But let’s forget about that...
A pretty significant turn in my thinking came when, around a decade ago, I discovered the anthropologist Susan Harding’s concept of the Repugnant Cultural Other. That concept ended up playing a big role in How to Think — and in a different way in Breaking Bread with the Dead, because there I argue that encountering...
When I hear people saying that the U.S. is not fighting a war against Iran I find myself remembering Rex Mottram and the priest charged with catechizing him: “Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: ‘Just as many as you say, Father.’ Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope...
One of the most famous ST:TNG episodes is “Darmok,” and many years ago Ian Bogost published a long essay about it that’s a fascinating combination of the importantly right and the importantly wrong. Bogost’s theme is the curious character of the Tamarian language, and if you want to know what’s curious about it I...
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