By Jessica Hooten Wilson

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Reading for the Love of God

“From my perspective, education is about passing the best that has been thought and said across culture and time so that the next group of people might love and glorify God. If that’s the case, then we might teach differently.” — Jessica Hooten Wilson

Author and professor Jessica Hooten Wilson talks with us about the spiritual practice of reading, the ways books shape our souls, and the impact this posture has on our teaching.

One of my favorite things about our podcast listener community is that we are a people who love to read and who crave learning and growing as we engage with the written word. So — we invited author and professor Jessica Hooten Wilson to our podcast to talk about the joy of reading as a spiritual practice. Jessica’s recent book Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice, outlines ways that Christian thinkers across the ages have developed their faith through the act of reading — and then instructs us in some practices that can help all of us to read generously and with an openness to spiritual formation. In our conversation, Jessica and I also spend some time talking about what life is like as a woman in the academy, and I included an outtake from our conversation at the very end where Jessica shares how her family manages dual careers and three (soon to be four) young children. I think you’ll really love this conversation.

So jump right in! We're so glad you're here.

You can listen on iTunes or at The Women Scholars and Professionals Podcast. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.

Further resources for this interview:


 

Photo by Matt Bango on StockSnap

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About the Author

Jessica Hooten Wilson (PhD, Baylor University) is the inaugural Visiting Scholar of Liberal Arts at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. She previously taught at the University of Dallas. She is the author of The Scandal of Holiness, Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky (winner of a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award), and two books on Walker Percy. She is also the coeditor of Learning the Good Life and Solzhenitsyn and American Culture. Wilson speaks around the world on topics as varied as Russian novelists, Catholic thinkers, and Christian ways of reading. (Photo Credit: Andrea Barnett)

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