Alan Jacobs

Church Signs Across America by Steve and Pam Paulson Overlook, 162 pages, $19.95 Bible Road: Signs of Faith in the American Landscape by Sam Fentress David & Charles, 159 pages, $29.99 I will always remember the day I discovered the concept of irony—not the word; that would come much later. . . . . Continue Reading »

Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth by Alessandro Scafi University of Chicago Press, 400 pages, $55 Looking through the many and lavish illustrations of Alessandro Scafi’s Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth, I find myself drawn again and again to a photograph reproduced . . . . Continue Reading »

A few years ago, I wrote an essay in praise of the Harry Potter books that yielded some interesting responses. One man, knowing that I am a Christian, wrote in some astonishment: Did I not see that the books symbolically describe an alchemy-based paganism, a model of magical power deeply hostile to . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1877 some concerned citizens of Wheaton, Illinois, decided that they needed to do something about the strange little college that stood in the midst of their town. It had been there since the early 1850s, first as a Wesleyan school called the Illinois Institute and then—reinvented by Jonathan . . . . Continue Reading »

As the Italians say, traduttori, tradittori: translators are traitors. But the translator who shrugs and—cheerfully or resignedly—agrees that “every translation is an interpretation, after all” has too readily embraced the way of the tradittore. The translator who strives for strict . . . . Continue Reading »

One summer years ago, I attended a conference that met at Princeton Theological Seminary; we participants stayed in the seminary dormitory. We soon discovered that the lounge on the first floor of the dorm had been converted into a kind of outsized study. A large table dominated the room; scattered . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the chief themes of the narrative theology that came to prominence in the Anglo-American world in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the centrality of communal experience to the life of Christ’s Church. In the work of Lesslie Newbigin, Stanley Hauerwas, Gerald Laughlin, and many others, . . . . Continue Reading »

The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis by Leon Kass. Free Press. 576 pp. $35. Leon Kass’ meditation on the wisdom of Genesis is expansive, curious, fascinatingly rich and digressive. This I claim without reservation, but my next claim begins with a qualifier: to me , it is also quite maddening. . . . . Continue Reading »

Wesley Kort’s C. S. Lewis Then and Now is extraordinarily puzzling. It contains many fresh and valuable insights about Lewis, but my overall response is to wonder why Kort would choose to enlist Lewis in a project of cultural restoration that seems thoroughly alien to Lewis’ whole body of . . . . Continue Reading »

By the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden was the most famous and most widely imitated young poet in England. His verse was brilliant, ironic, often funny, wide-ranging in its reference—equally at home in the worlds of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry and the technology of mining—and sometimes . . . . Continue Reading »