Alan Jacobs

Woody Allen used to joke that he had been kicked out of college for cheating on an exam in his metaphysics class: He looked into the soul of the guy sitting next to him. It’s not a form of cheating I’m especially tempted by. On those rare occasions when I have truly looked into my own . . . . Continue Reading »

Alain de Botton has been engaged for many years now in an intriguing project”to get people to think of philosophy not as an abstruse academic discipline but rather as a guide to living. He has written several books in which he brings the resources of philosophical reflection to bear on topics . . . . Continue Reading »

The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay Jossey-Bass, 224 pages, $23.95 Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices by Brian McLaren Thomas Nelson, 240 pages, $17.99 New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church by Jonathan . . . . Continue Reading »

History Lesson: A Race Odyssey by Mary Lefkowitz Yale University Press, 208 pages, $25 In History Lesson Mary Lefkowitz tells a story that has three distinct themes. The story itself is particular and local, largely involving some nasty academic politics at Wellesley College, but the themes are of . . . . Continue Reading »

Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents by James Simpson Harvard University, Press368 pages, $27.95 The past twenty years have brought major changes to university presses. Decreasing financial support from their home institutions has forced many of these presses to act . . . . Continue Reading »

Long, long ago, in the years just preceding the Second World War”as Germany was overrunning Czechoslovakia and annexing Austria, and as Neville Chamberlain was preparing to travel to Munich to sort these things out”the novelist E.M. Forster wrote an essay called “What I . . . . Continue Reading »

Wheaton College, where I teach, does many wonderful things that go unnoticed by the world; we seem to draw a great deal of attention only when our administration lets a faculty member go. A few years ago, the dismissal of my friend Joshua Hochschild upon his embrace of Catholicism created quite a . . . . Continue Reading »

Awhile back, I started keeping a commonplace book. Commonplace book is an odd phrase, perhaps, because what you are supposed to record in such a book is, from one point of view, anything but commonplace. It’s likely that, as long as people have been able to write, some have recorded memorable . . . . Continue Reading »

The film version of The Golden Compass opens on December 7 and it’s worth remembering that the book, part of Philip Pullman’s series of fantasy novels, was widely discussed when Pullman finished the series back in the fall of 2000. first things published two sharp discussions at the time, both . . . . Continue Reading »

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 established for me by the editor of this magazine, And those hours may be numbered as the sands of the desert. And for each of them Kahlil Gibran has . . . . Continue Reading »