James Wilson, the de Nicola Center’s 2025–26 postdoctoral fellow, has long held a fascination with Southern writer William Faulkner. The author became the subject of Wilson’s dissertation at the University of Cambridge, which Wilson is currently working to develop into a book.

“The poet and trappist monk Thomas Merton once described Faulkner as a biblical prophet—an author who is ‘more prophetic, in the biblical sense, than any theologian writing in the 20th century,’” Wilson says. “Though Merton planned to write a book on the matter, he tragically died before he could write it. In many ways, I see my dissertation as picking up where Merton left off. It’s been amazing that the de Nicola Center has given me the time and the resources to begin turning it into a book and bringing it to life.”

In addition to writing and participating in the intellectual life of the Center during his postdoctoral fellowship, Wilson is offering an undergraduate course this spring semester in the Department of Theology based on his doctoral dissertation, titled “Faulkner and the Bible: Modernism, Metaphysics, and Prophecy.” The course focuses on the relevance of the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures in Faulkner’s writing, addressing questions of ethics and religious experience in works spanning from the masterpiece The Sound and the Fury to the much-lauded Absalom! Absalom!

“Faulkner has always been my ‘lion in the path,’ so to speak, over the years—my Virgil who met me outside the gates of Hades and showed me the way out of the dark woods,” says Wilson. “After almost a century, his strange, biblically haunted stories still manage to crackle with spiritual vitality— simultaneously managing to confront you in the hidden depths of your existential experience while awakening you to some mysterious, disturbing meaningfulness beneath the crust of time and history.”

Wilson relishes the opportunity to use Faulkner’s oeuvre as an entry point to introduce students to the broad array of American modernist fiction, which he finds to be an under-explored genre even among Notre Dame’s well-read undergraduates. He encourages students to embrace the difficulty that comes with reading modernist fiction and to treat it as a mystery to be engaged rather than a question to be answered.

“I wanted to explore the relationship between theology and literature through a new lens,” says Kate Apelian, a Sorin Fellow and senior theology major in Wilson’s class. “Professor Wilson strikes the delicate balance between guiding the class in grappling with the questions posed by Faulkner and encouraging us to present our own observations. I always leave class with a sense that the questions we discussed together have metaphysical import in my own life beyond the scope of the classroom and the text.”

Wilson professes to be impressed by his students’ ability to embrace Faulkner’s intimidating prose, successfully analyzing works that puzzle even expert literary critics. “This group of students, more than any I have taught, has a rare combination of earnestness, insight, and a deep sense of spiritual humility,” says Wilson. “They simultaneously bring an intellectual seriousness to the task of reading and understanding, without feeling the need to impose their preconceived conclusions and agendas onto a complex and challenging text.”

Wilson first visited the de Nicola Center in 2018 with his band the Sons of Bill, performing a concert for Sorin Fellows and the Notre Dame community. “Music and the arts were always a focal point in my spiritual life, a way of reaching into the deepest parts of myself and the hidden meaning of experience, as a means of trying to connect with the deepest parts of others,” he says. The band went on hiatus while Wilson pursued his degree at Cambridge, during which time he was a frequent presenter at the de Nicola Center’s annual Fall Conference. “Though my life as a teacher and scholar may look very different from my former life on the stage, from the inside, it all feels like part of one coherent story—a unified vocation.”

Wilson will offer a public lecture at Notre Dame on April 15, entitled “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Literature, Metaphysics, and Apocalypse,” with a response from Cyril O’Regan, the Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology emeritus. “McCarthy is not only one of the few contemporary authors who situates himself in a self-conscious conversation with the canon of Western Literature, but I also see him as perhaps the only 21st century author to take up Faulkner’s ‘biblically prophetic’ mantle—diagnosing the deep spiritual pathologies of the age by situating them within the timeless drama of the Biblical story,” Wilson says. “Though, much like [with] Faulkner, many contemporary critics read his disturbing fiction as morbid, pessimistic, and hopelessly nihilistic, I believe this misses out on the biblical depth of McCarthy’s imaginative vision. Like Faulkner, McCarthy simply has what Toni Morrison described as an ‘unflinching gaze’—a refusal to look away when everyone else looks away. After living my life with these authors, I've found that what animates this ‘gaze’ is a spiritual courage and an unwavering commitment to reality—something like faith.”

*Updated April 8, 2026 with public lecture details.