Jessica Hooten Wilson, Author at Jessica Hooten Wilson

10 Books You Need to Read Before You Graduate College

“If you don’t read good books, you will read bad ones,” C. S. Lewis writes. We may need to update Lewis’s claim for the twenty-first-century reader, for those who do not read good books will not necessarily read bad ones, but may—in not knowing why or…

Jessica Hooten WilsonAugust 1, 2020

Articles & Essays

‘Flannery’ Documentary Highlights Author’s Faith-driven Work

Flannery O’Connor insisted there would be no biographies about her because “lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” A Southern writer confined by lupus to a farm outside of Milledgeville, Georgia, O’Connor taught people through her fiction how…

Jessica Hooten WilsonJuly 24, 2020

Book Reviews

Lessons from Bonhoeffer: Are You Standing Up to Injustice?

If you ever wonder what you would’ve done had you seen Hitler rise to power, or African American children barred from white schools, Laura Fabrycky reminds us that we’re currently acting in the exact same way we would’ve then. For our time is no less…

Jessica Hooten WilsonJune 12, 2020

Interviews Podcast & Radio Interviews

The Great Books Podcast Episode 134: Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Click here to listen to this podcast episode on the National Review website. John J. Miller is joined by Jessica Hooten Wilson of John Brown University to discuss Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.

Jessica Hooten WilsonJune 2, 2020

Articles & Essays

Prophets for Our Age of Suicide

To read or not to read literary criticism, that is the question for the twenty-first century reader who prefers to process 42 characters instead of 42 minutes of reading a substantial argument. I draw the either-or dilemma from Hamlet’s famous speech on suicide, whether or…

Jessica Hooten WilsonMay 31, 2020

Book Reviews

Engaging the Catholic Imagination

In September 2019 Loyola University in Chicago hosted the third biennial Catholic Imagination Conference, attended by hundreds of writers, readers, teachers, publishers, and aficionados of Catholic literature. Headliners include National Book Award winners, bestselling memoirists, award-winning playwrights and filmmakers, and beloved poets: Alice McDermott, Tobias Wolff,…

Jessica Hooten WilsonMay 28, 2020

Articles & Essays

Bodying Forth the Classics: A Manifesto

This spring I read Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie solely because of the blurb on the back of the book said: “Determined to instill in independence, passion, and ambition, Miss Brodie advises her girls, ‘Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty come…

Jessica Hooten WilsonMay 25, 2020

Articles & Essays

Be Pilgrims, Not Romantics

Odds are you have spent a lot of time lately wishing you had the map in front of you. Until this point, there were signs ahead of each turn, clear indicators of what would be next. And now, it all appears a vast field, or…

Jessica Hooten WilsonMay 18, 2020

Book Reviews

For Good Mothering Advice, Skip the Mommy Blogs and Look to Christ

Parenting children requires a rich understanding of God’s nature. Mothers today face an onslaught of mixed messages about how best to parent in the 21st century. Podcasts, blogs, and books on mommy-ing abound, but many of them indulge regularly in shallow parenting advice and fallacies…

Jessica Hooten WilsonMay 8, 2020