[ARCHIVED NEWS RELEASE]
02-13-2020
LeTourneau University is hosting a free, public lecture titled “Captain Marvel vs. Flannery O’Connor” by professor, author and speaker Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson from 8 to 9 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 19, at Berry Auditorium in the Glaske Center on the LETU campus, 2100 S. Mobberly Ave. in Longview. The event is hosted by LETU’s Writing Center and Liberal Arts Guild.
“When I think of scholars who exemplify the Christian literary tradition, I think of Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson,” said LETU associate professor of English and writing center director Aaron Brown. “She is such a lively speaker who engages with culture in innovative ways. We hope our students and our community come out for what promises to be a great conversation.”
Wilson speaks on Russian novelists, Catholic thinkers and Christian ways of reading. She has written three books. Her 2017 book titled “Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky,” received a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year award. In 2019 she received the Hiett Prize for Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.
Wilson’s book titled “Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence” (2017) discusses how Percy’s imitation of Dostoevsky made him “a literary saint.” She describes her third book, “Reading Walker Percy’s Novels,” as a “handbook for those who appreciate Percy’s fiction without understanding its philosophy.”
She is co-editor of the volume “Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West,” a collection of essays on the legacy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. She is currently preparing for publication Flannery O’Connor’s unfinished novel “Why Do the Heathen Rage?”
Wilson is an associate professor of humanities at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, where she directs the graduate certificate in Classical Christian Studies.
Her books will be available for purchase at the event.
LeTourneau University is the Christian polytechnic university in the nation where educators engage students to nurture Christian virtue, develop competency and ingenuity in their professional fields, integrate faith and work, and serve the local and global community. LETU offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs across a range of disciplines and delivery models at LETU’s residential campus in Longview, Texas, hybrid options at centers in the Dallas and Houston areas and fully online programs. For additional information, visit www.letu.edu.
Categories: Humanities, TheGuild
