From Wheaton to Baylor
Alan Jacobs (born 1958) is 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. He earned his B.A. from the University of Alabama in 1980 and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1987, and spent nearly three decades at Wheaton College — where he held the Clyde S. Kilby Chair in English — before moving to Baylor in 2013.
He is the author of nearly twenty books, ranging from academic literary criticism to widely-read works of cultural and religious commentary. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and First Things, and his blog “Text Patterns” has been one of the most consistently interesting online venues for thinking about reading, writing, and the life of the mind as a Christian.
The Heir to Lewis
The comparison to C.S. Lewis is not merely a compliment — it names something structurally accurate. Like Lewis, Jacobs is a professional literary scholar who writes for general audiences without condescension to either. Like Lewis, he holds rigorous intellectual standards and serious Christian conviction together without sacrificing either. Like Lewis, he writes with a clarity that makes difficulty look easy.
His 2006 biography The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis is the best single account of Lewis’s imagination — not because it covers the most ground but because it identifies what was actually distinctive about how Lewis thought. Jacobs understood that Lewis’s central achievement was not any particular argument but a way of reading: a habit of bringing everything he encountered into relation with the deepest things he believed, and asking what the conjunction revealed.
The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis (Oxford, 2018) is a study of five writers — T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, and Jacques Maritain — who were, in the darkest year of the Second World War, independently thinking about what kind of world they hoped to help build after it. The book demonstrates what serious Christian intellectual engagement looks like: historically grounded, literarily sensitive, theologically alert.
The Theology of Reading
Jacobs’s earliest academic book, A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (2001), argued that the right way to read — the ethically defensible and spiritually serious way to read — is the way of charity: approaching a text as you would approach a person, assuming intelligence, assuming that what seems wrong might be something you haven’t yet understood.
This is not sentimentality or the suspension of critical judgment. It is the precondition for critical judgment that is actually responsive to the text rather than to the reader’s prior commitments. Jacobs draws on Augustine’s conviction in On Christian Doctrine that all texts ultimately point toward or away from love, and that the reader’s orientation shapes what they are capable of seeing.
TLA reads Jacobs as one of the clearest contemporary practitioners of literary-theological reading: taking texts seriously as texts, taking their theology seriously as theology, and refusing the division between critical intelligence and Christian conviction that the academy tends to enforce.
“To read is to be changed, or it is nothing.” — Alan Jacobs
Principal Works
- A Theology of Reading – 2001
- The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis – 2006
- Original Sin: A Cultural History – 2008
- The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction – 2011
- The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography – 2013
- How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds – 2017
- The Year of Our Lord 1943 – 2018
- Breaking Bread with the Dead – 2020
- Paradise Lost: A Biography – 2024
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