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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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:...