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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...