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)
Soundtrack I have mixed but largely unfavorable views of the rise of industrial society, but what prevents my views from being wholly negative is my fascination with and admiration for the enormously complex projects that only became possible after the Industrial Revolution. I want to know how Bazalgette’s sewage...
This has been going around lately: The usual response is That’s so depressing! But I dunno — I think most devoted (obsessive?) readers understand that the world doesn’t value books the way we value books. It’s nice when someone’s collection passes into the hands of people who treasure it, but that’s a rare thing and...
“Yesterday’s Enterprise” is an alternate-timeline episode of ST:TNG, and if someone had told me that before I watched it, I might have skipped to the next episode. I don’t have an absolute objection to stories that deal in time-travel or other forms of timeplay, but such tactics are very easy to do badly. They’re...
My friend Edward Mendelson, teacher extraordinaire, has made a little chart about symmetries in the Iliad. You can do this with the Odyssey as well — oppositional or echoing events seems to have been a major feature of Homeric composition. For instance: By experiencing the journey of Telemachus away from home, and...
Near the beginning of this long, fascinating, and deeply depressing video Adam Neely says that he doesn’t think Mikey Shulman, the CEO and prime hypeman of Suno, is evil. I dunno, I think he might be evil. A person who makes and advocates for anything this destructive will likely be one of the following: Evil —...
I gave Claude and Gemini this prompt: Draw me a graph showing the rise and fall of weekly cinema attendance, as a percentage of the American population, between 1920 and 2020. Then draw me a graph showing the rise and fall of weekly church attendance, as a percentage of the American population, between 1920 and...
Micah Mattix’s Prufrock on Monday linked to two essay-reviews that I think should be considered in tandem. In Aeon, Richard Beard writes: Turing’s Imitation Game paper was published 14 years after the first Writers’ Workshop convened at the University of Iowa, in 1936. Turing may not have known, with his grounding...
I’ve been enjoying my friend Adam Roberts’s contributions to Critical Star Trek Studies, and they have taken me down the long road of memory to my early interest in TOS (The Original Series). But until just a couple of weeks ago I had not seen anything but TOS and the first three movies with that cast. Of course, I...
In an email to my friend Adam Roberts about Star Trek: The Next Generation — about which he has recently written eloquently — I told him this story: I was in high school when reruns of the canceled Original Series started getting traction, and my good friend Don was utterly devoted to the show. This was before home...
In the famous fifth chapter of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, “A Crisis in My Mental History,” we learn about the moment that Mill realized that he was in very great trouble: From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly...
Here’s something I’ll be talking about in my class on fantasy today — we’re just getting started with Phantastes. So I’m asking my students to look at the title page. First, let’s look at all the words on this page that help orient us: Phantastes: An odd word, obviously related to “fantasy” (sometimes spelled...
I am rarely hopeful about politics and culture — in the Milne Typology I am an Eeyore, which is the kind of thing that happens to people who reflect often upon original sin — but even so, much of what’s happening now surprises me. I always expect bad things, but I didn’t expect these bad things. For the record, and...
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