New Creation Conversation Episode 042 - Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson on the Importance of the Liberating Arts in Education, Reading Flannery O'Connor and Dostoevsky, and How Literature Can Shape Our Imagination Toward Holiness

Welcome to episode forty-two of New Creation Conversations. In today’s conversation I am joined by Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson. Dr. Wilson is the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. Jessica is a graduate of Pepperdine University, she has a Master of Arts in English from the University of Dallas, and a PhD in religion and literature from Baylor University.

She is the author of Giving the Devil his Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky - which received a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year award in the Culture and the Arts category. She has also written two books on Walker Percy and recently co-edited a book entitled Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West. A good deal of our conversation today centers around her brand-new book, which is set to be released in March by Brazos Press, entitled, The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints.

Jessica has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship to the Czech Republic, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study Dante in Florence in 2014, and the Biola Center for Christian Thought sabbatical fellowship. In 2018 she received the Emerging Public Intellectual Award given by a coalition of North American think tanks in collaboration with the Center for Christian Scholarship at Redeemer University College, and in 2019 she received the Hyatt Prize in Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. 

Clearly, Jessica is a gifted scholar, and a thoughtful and reflective Christian. I was very excited to get a chance to meet her and talk to her, in part, because I'm really interested in her new book exploring the theme of holiness and imagination in literature. But those of you who know me know I'm a little bit of a literature geek. And so, I was excited to get a chance to talk to her about the many connections between literature and faith, and why it's important for both Christian students, and Christian believers of all ages, to be good readers and to be wrestling with the best of literature and poetry. I hope those of you who are literature nerds like me will have your artistic soul fed by this conversation. Everyone listening may want to get a pen and note pad out because I promise that you are going to get a great 2022 reading list out from Jessica. As always, thanks for joining me for these New Creation Conversations. Here's my conversation with Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson.