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)
The People Outsourcing Their Thinking to AI – The Atlantic: James Bedford, an educator at the University of New South Wales who is focused on developing AI strategies for the classroom, started using LLMs almost daily after ChatGPT’s release. Over time, he found that his brain was defaulting to AI for thinking, he...
Almost everything that makes this collection worth reading happens between 1962 and 1964, with 1962 being the year when Kenner and Davenport are maximally stimulating of each other’s ideas — as I think this post demonstrates. Much later in life, both men are aware that their friendship is not what it once was. In...
As you all know, I don’t typically post about politics, but this post by my old friend Noah Millman: brilliantly illuminates the profound ethical failures — the abdications of ethical responsibility — that underlie many of the pathologies of our current moment: A view of power that sees it as incompatible with any...
An essay I have long meant to write bears (will bear, might bear) the following thesis: The last great masterpieces of the modernist epic are an anthropologist’s memoir and a work of literary criticism: Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955) and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner thought about that...
Hugh Kenner to Guy Davenport, 27 April 1962 (I:99): Yes, machines evolve, as Disney knows. His art utterly germane to a machine biology. The clue to decline of silent film was switch for 24 f.p.s., with introduction of sound. Before that, projection speed was 16 f.p.s., and camera speed was whatever the cameraman...
I don’t know what’s happening elsewhere, but in the Honors College here at Baylor — or rather among those of us who teach the humanities — it’s been fun to see what we’re doing to banish the LLM demons. Most of us are incorporating a lot of handwriting into our teaching: several colleagues have been doing blue-book...
From my biography of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian: There was a bright spot in the Lewis home during at least part of the war: her name was June Flewett, and she was one of the many thousands of children who were evacuated from London and housed elsewhere as soon as the war began. The Kilns had taken in four schoolgirls...
The Museo Mario Praz in Rome is the home of the great art historian and critic named, you guessed it, Mario Praz (1896-1982). Though Praz took degrees from Bologna and Florence, he was born in Rome, died there, and in between was a constant figure in the city’s social world. In graduate school I read his 1930 book...
When I’m trying to decide whether I want to watch a movie, my first step is to ask this question: Do I want to watch a movie that looks like that? I know from long experience that I have strong responses to the visual Gestalt of a film, so strong that if that Gestalt alienates me I will not enjoy the movie, no...
In one of my classes we’re about halfway through The Brothers Karamazov, and we had an interesting conversation yesterday in which we tried to sort through what Ivan means when he says he has a “Euclidean mind.” One of my students rightly pointed out that my own explanation of the phrase did not seem to fit all his...
Dorothy L. Sayers had written ”Kings in Judaea,” the first play of a series she had been asked to write for the BBC Children’s Service, in the autumn of 1940, the project fell apart when Sayers refused to make changes demanded of her by the Children’s Service staff. But the Rev. James Welch, the BBC’s director of...
Forty years ago, I attended a conference of literature professors at Christian liberal-arts colleges in which the keynote speaker was an esteemed Christian journalist, tasked with giving us advice, I guess. Whatever his task was, he lectured us about our narrow-mindedness, our parochial attitudes, our failure to...
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