Hello. My name is Alan Jacobs. I am Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University, and a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

My next book will be Dorothy L. Sayers: Works and Days. You may pre-order it at the Oxford University Press website and at Amazon.

My most recent already-published book is Paradise Lost: A Biography — an entry in this series. You may order it at the Princeton University Press website or at Amazon.

Earlier: a critical edition of W. H. Auden’s 1955 collection of poems The Shield of Achilles. You may order it at the Princeton University Press website or at Amazon. Earlier still: Breaking Bread with the Dead. You may get a brief preview of it by reading this excerpt.

You can find a mostly-complete list of my books here.

On micro.blog I post quotes, images, and quick thoughts; at The Homebound Symphony I post longer thoughts; and I have an ever-ramifying long-term project called Cosmos Malick.

You may subscribe to a weekly digest of my micro.blog posts — I link there to everything I post elsewhere (at least, when I remember). I put a good deal of time and effort into my online writing, and am therefore very grateful when when readers support that work via my Buy Me a Coffee page.

If you would like to invite me to speak, first of all Thank you, but I am no longer doing public speaking, for reasons I explain here.

Here are some essays I’ve published in the past few years:

  • “Up from Darkness: A Possible Future of Humanism” in The Hedgehog Review
  • “How Not to Save the Planet” in The Hedgehog Review
  • “Yesterday’s Men” in Harper's
  • “You Keep Using That Word” in Comment
  • “Looking Westward” in Raritan
  • “The Far Invisible: Thomas Pynchon as America’s Theologian” in The Hedgehog Review
  • “The Blues Idiom at Church” in Comment
  • “A Humanism of the Abyss” in The New Atlantis
  • “Between Chaos and the Man” in Harper's
  • “Staying for the Truth” in The Hedgehog Review
  • “The Love Feast” (on Auden) in Harper's
  • “Something Happened By Us: A Demonology” in The New Atlantis
  • “Recovering Piety” in Comment
  • “Injured Parties” in The Hedgehog Review
  • “Status Anxiety” (on Jonathan Franzen) at Harper’s
  • “What Is Cosmotechnics?” in The New Atlantis
  • “Everything Is Illuminated” (on William Blake) at Harper's
  • “Raising Kael” at Literary Hub
  • “After Technopoly” in The New Atlantis
  • “Prophet of the Human-Built World: An Introduction to John Ruskin” in Comment
  • “Thomas Merton, the Monk Who Became a Prophet” at The New Yorker
  • “Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future” in The Hedgehog Review
  • “Filth Therapy: A Cunning Word” in Comment

    • Here are a few other online places where you can find my writing:

  • The Gospel of the Trees
  • My author page at The Dispatch
  • My author page at The Hedgehog Review
  • My retired Text Patterns blog
  • My writing for the late and still much-lamented Books & Culture
  • My writing for Harper’s

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