Jessica Hooten Wilson - Witherspoon Fellow, Summer 2003
A professor, author, speaker, and the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University, Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson’s lifelong journey in the exercise of intellectual community and socratic dialogue began years ago. It was spurred by her participation as a Summer 2003 fellow of the Witherspoon Fellowship, which became the John Jay Institute just a few years later.
As an undergraduate student at Pepperdine, Wilson was by no means a stranger to the reading of long texts. Yet, during the course of the Witherspoon Fellowship, she felt new avenues in her mind opened by the intensity and depth of the reading program. “I had never read so much in such a condensed amount of time; I didn't even know that much reading and thinking was attainable in only fourteen weeks. The rigor prepared me for graduate school and the ability to take on those levels of discussion with confidence.”
Wilson went on to earn her MA in English at the University of Dallas and her PhD in Religion and Literature at Baylor University. Since then, she has pursued excellence in her academic life, winning the laurels of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study at the Summer Institute for Dante at Florence, Italy, and the prestigious Hiett Prize in Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Christianity Today awarded her two “Culture and the Arts” Book of the Year Awards for her publications Giving the Devil His Due and The Scandal of Holiness, in 2018 and 2022 respectively. These are just two of the six books she has written and three she has edited, many of which have received similar accolades.
“Even to this day, I have no problem sharing my informed opinion or speaking boldly things I know to be true to audiences that might disagree [...] my confidence and boldness were curated and fire-tested by my time in DC with the Witherspoon Fellowship.”
Wilson has continued cultivating the life she loved in the Witherspoon Fellowship. In her role as the Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine, she is not only leading courses like “Homer to Arendt” for Pepperdine’s students, but also sponsoring book clubs on Zhuangzi and Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy so that physicists, business professors, and theologians might remember what it means to be living intentionally and discussing great works together.
Professor Wilson is optimistic about the role of Great Books in the future of higher education. “All education used to be great books education, even when it wasn't with books! Socrates taught his followers to love what is beautiful and pursue it via conversation and discussion of Homer and other poets. [...] For Pepperdine, the Great Books program has a forty-year celebrated history that is expanding in the future into a full blown Great Books Honors College, so that we may be able to host all the people who desire education of human liberty and flourishing.”
The vision of the John Jay Institute is “the renewal of American civilization.” Nowhere is this vision seen more poignantly than in the cultivation of the next generation through education. Jessica Hooten Wilson is one of many alumni of the John Jay Institute’s fellowships who are cultivating the fields of our educational institutions and ensuring a plentiful harvest.
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