Alan Jacobs

Debate over the Benedict Option has been conducted at the level of competing world-historical metanarratives. Instead, let’s focus on the local and personal. Continue Reading »

Laurusby eugene vodolazkintranslated by lisa haydenoneworld, 384 pages, $24.99 Eugene Vodolazkin’s novel Laurus has been much praised, especially by Christians, and rightly so. It is a fine novel. But at its heart, I suspect, the book is not Christian in spirit so much as Hindu—more . . . . Continue Reading »

In an episode from the first season of HBO’s series Girls, Hannah Horvath”played by the show’s creator and chief writer, Lena Dunham”is having sex with her occasional lover Adam when Adam does something odd. The description I am about to give will strike some as exceedingly graphic, but in fact I will exclude the more disturbing details… . Continue Reading »

Alan Jacobs contrasts the moral worlds of Jane Austen . . . . Continue Reading »

I have been thinking a lot about stupidity lately, largely, I suppose, because I spend a good deal of time online. I define stupidity as “remediable but unremedied ignorance,” and few human traits are more evident to a reader of your average website. It is relatively easy to discover that . . . . Continue Reading »

Terry Eagleton made his name in the 1980s by demonstrating that it is possible to write wittily and even elegantly about literary theory. At the time this was something of a revelation. Theory was almost synonymous with what its advocates might have called a “problematizing” . . . . Continue Reading »

Alan Jacobs reviewed the great twentieth-century poet’s complete oeuvre, and found it verse than expected. From the November 2007 issue. I Expansive and yet vacuous is the prose of Kahlil Gibran, And weary grows the mind doomed to read it. The hours of my penance lengthen, The penance . . . . Continue Reading »

The Annotated Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, edited by Annie Gauger. W.W. Norton, 480 pages, $39.95 The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition by Kenneth Grahame, edited by Seth Lerer Belknap/Harvard, 288 pages, $35 My history as a reader is an odd one. I began, conventionally enough, . . . . Continue Reading »

Worlds Made of Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West by Anthony Grafton Harvard, 432 pages, $29.95 Alas, poor Casaubon! Your name, thanks to George Eliot, has become a byword for dryasdust pedantry and pseudomonastic self-absorption. The creaky scholar of Eliot’s novel . . . . Continue Reading »

Some years ago I was leading a summer study tour in Oxford, England, during which as a matter of course—we were from Wheaton College, after all—we paid a visit to Magdalen College, the longtime academic home of C.S. Lewis. The dean of divinity, as Magdalen terms its chaplain, was gracious and . . . . Continue Reading »