The Homebound Symphony
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.
Latest Posts
Brad East: The gospel does not promise you health. It does not promise you wealth. It does not promise you anything in this life except the person and work of Jesus. You may or may not get married; you may or may not have children; you...
I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead! — Lesslie Newbigin To hope radically is to see the new possibilities for human flourishing where none seemed possible before. […] Radical hope, as I have been...
When classes ended in May, I was with my wife in the hospital, so I couldn’t wrap up my classes appropriately. Instead, I recorded brief audio lectures. Below you’ll find a transcription (with links added) of the lecture I sent to my...
I see that The Rest Is History has recently done a series on what happened at Gallipoli in 1915, which as it happens is one of my obsessions. This isn’t a post about that campaign as such, but about two related things. ~ 1 ~ The assault...
I’ve bought a year of the Pro plan. At the end of that year I will do a thorough reassessment, and will not renew unless I can (a) identify significant ongoing needs, (b) continue to believe that Anthropic is not quite as corrupt as the...
Antón Barba-Kay: AI is not “inherently evil” in the sense that it can be used exclusively to bomb and oppress. But not even nuclear weapons or machine guns work that way. We are never caused to do anything by a tool (or a narcotic)....
A beat is a repeated sequence of percussive effects. A groove is an extended engagement with time. It takes certain musical skills to construct a good beat, but that’s a job you can outsource to a machine. There’s a different kind of...
My friend Edward Mendelson knows more about Auden than anyone ever has, and probably more than anyone ever will. Certainly he knows far more about Auden than I do. Keep that in mind through what follows. Some years ago Mendelson wrote an...
I don’t mean to compare myself in any serious way with a major thinker like Rowan Williams, but in his new book, Solidarity: The Work of Recognition, he is working on exactly the same problem that I have been working on in recent years:...
Sean Keilen’s Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts may be the best book about liberal education that I’ve ever read. Keilen maintains throughout the book a double focus. Focus one is Shakespeare’s portrayal of...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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)...