Jessica Hooten Wilson on Isolation and the Misuse of Power in Shakespeare's The Tempest

Good Faith

News, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

5 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

Wrestling with Shakespeare, Faith, and the Limits of Technology

Host Curtis Chang and Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson—Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University—explore The Tempest by William Shakespeare and its timeless wisdom for our technology-driven world. Through Prospero's struggle with power, control, and love, they draw parallels between Shakespeare's "magic" and our modern dependence on digital tools. Wilson explains how the play invites us to surrender our illusions of control, embrace humility, and rediscover relationships grounded in grace. Curtis and Jessica's discussion touches on C.S. Lewis, Andy Crouch, and the spiritual discipline of wrestling with hard texts and ideas in an age of easy answers from ChatGPT.

(02:30) - Dependence Upon Technology as Magic

(05:40) - What Do We Forget in Our Obsessions?

(11:03) - The Change in Prospero

(13:41) - Engaging With Challenging Texts

(18:53) - The Temptation of AI

(21:40) - Celebrating Good Faith Podcast Production

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Mentioned In This Episode:

William Shakespeare's The Tempest (entire play)
Andy Crouch's The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place
Genesis 32:22-32 (ESV) - Jacob Wrestling with God or "the Angel"
C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man (pdf)
The Tempest Act V, Scene 1: "Prospero's Speech"
John 1:1-14 (ESV) - Jesus as the Word or "logos"
Hebrews 5:11-6:12 (ESV) - the metaphor of milk and solid food

Transcript

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0:00.0	You know, in Genesis where God comes down and wrestles with Jacob and then tells us the name of
0:06.7	his people is Israel, those who wrestle with God, guess what? It's still our nature. Like,
0:12.9	it's still our identity as God's people to refuse the easy way and wrestle with the word we don't
0:19.6	understand. Jesus also calls himself the word. I feel like God, what he wants us to do is wrestle with the word we don't understand. Jesus also calls himself the word.
0:22.5	I feel like God, what he wants us to do is wrestle with hard things.
0:57.3	Right. Welcome to the Good Faith podcast. I'm your host, Curtis Chang. The Good Faith podcast is a production of redeeming Babel, a nonpartisan 501C3 nonprofit. And the good faith is are followers of Jesus help each other make sense of the world.
1:04.0	And this is a series that we call reading to make sense of the world. Even though we're a podcast, we also deeply believe that an important way that we interpret the world is by reading books,
1:13.1	in an era dominated by the consumption of videos and scrolling of short articles, we would do well to remind ourselves that
1:19.7	from the composition of the Bible onward, books have always been God's gift to his people.
1:27.3	That's why I'm excited to welcome Jessica Houdin-Wilson,
1:30.6	who is the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University
1:34.8	and the author of Numerous Books herself.
1:37.7	Jessica is a regular guest of Good Faith who comes on here to help all of us read with discernment. So, Jessica, welcome back to the Good Faith
1:46.8	podcast. Thank you. I appreciate you bringing me back. All right. So we have you here to recommend
1:53.0	books. What is the book you've chosen to recommend this time? I'm recommending an old book,
1:59.2	and I say that with hesitancy, because even though I teach
2:02.6	mostly old books, people just have stigmas about old books. They just seem to like, there's
2:08.5	some sort of protest in them already because it's like, oh, you're going to make me read something
2:13.2	I read in high school. But I'm actually recommending The Tempest by Shakespeare.
2:18.3	So it's old and it's definitely one of those books you probably read in high school, but I'm
2:23.3	going to highly recommend it.
2:24.3	Okay.
	...

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