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
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...
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...
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...
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:...
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...
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...
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...
“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...
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...
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...