Chair and Professor of English Justin Jackson spoke on the imagery of Christ in literature.
| Courtesy of Hillsdale College
Justin Jackson’s inbox began to blow up five years ago, after Hillsdale College released the trailer for an online course called “The Genesis Story.”
“When people send me emails, I feel an obligation to reply. I can’t not reply,” said Jackson, chairman and professor of English as well as the online course’s instructor.
To answer those questions, in early September 2023, Jackson decided to start a Substack called “How Do You Read It?” with his former student, Danny Rognlie ’22, the Substack’s executive producer. The Substack releases newsletters every Tuesday and video episodes every Friday to its 2,100 subscribers, where each episode, between 15 and 20 minutes, conducts literary analysis of a passage of Scripture.
According to Jackson, the producers edited the trailer — which has reached 20 million views on YouTube — and course videos in a way that generated more questions than answers for viewers. It kept the viewers watching, but also kept Jackson’s inbox overflowing with questions and critiques.
“This course is not about a Christian reading of Scripture at all. It’s not a Jewish reading. It’s a literary reading, and I abide by that,” Jackson said. “I think my viewers like it a lot. It is their spiritual meat to feast off of. But you need not be orthodox to feast off that spiritual meat.”
Not only that, the class’s six lectures amounted to only three hours of content on Genesis.
“Just one day of summer school, where in three hours we maybe get through four chapters of Genesis, is equivalent to the entire online Genesis course,” Jackson said. “So they asked me to cover all of Genesis in three hours total. It’s impossible.”
After reading Genesis in Jackson’s class, Rognlie was eager to share Jackson’s reading with the world.
“When I was a student, he was a good friend and mentor despite my laughable performance in his courses, and here was an opportunity to continue learning and make available his unique teaching beyond the college,” Rognlie said in an email.
When Jackson came up with the idea of the Substack, he asked Rognlie to join him on the project.
“Danny knows tons of stuff and whatever he doesn’t know, the beauty of Danny is he’ll go figure it out,” Jackson said. “All of a sudden — all of my emails, I don’t have them anymore. It’s fantastic.”
Rognlie takes care of filming each episode, editing the audio and video, posting and copywriting the content, promoting the Substack, and handling technical difficulties that come along. He said he would like to thank alumni Luke Robson ’17, Gabe Listro ’20, and Shadrach Strehle ’19 for helping them launch the Substack.
“Jackson is the pretty face with the book learning, and I do the rest,” Rognlie said. “We like the division of labor; I don’t trust him on a program newer than Windows ’98, and he doesn’t trust me to be interesting on camera.”
Jackson said each episode of the Substack serves to mimic his classes at Hillsdale.
“We do what we need to do,” Jackson said. “Here’s the ugliness of human beings, here’s the beauty of human beings. It’s all in Scripture, and let’s go from there.”
Shea Whitmore ’18, now a classical school teacher in Florida, said he took both Great Books classes with Jackson.
“He just knows so much about these books, and he is able to draw such deep things out of the text,” Whitmore said. “It’s very simple. You read something and you have thoughts about it, and then we try to get you to figure out why you think what you thought and tie it back to the text.”
To prepare for the lectures, Jackson examines the author’s text, the Hebrew, rabbinic exegesis, Christian exegesis, and the Septuagint, among other materials. However, the lectures are not necessarily intended for experts to hear.
“It’s a non-denominational, non-religious, non-theological channel. I’m not there to debate,” Jackson said. “I give readings that aren’t even within my tradition or within my own published scholar, there’s just not a lot at stake for me in being right.”
Jackson spoke to the online learning team before starting the Substack, for it is inextricably connected to the college’s online courses.
“I had to figure out, ‘Can I go do this?’” Jackson said. “Not only did they give me the green light, but they’re very good about actually throwing out a link to the Substack.”
Jackson said he is very grateful for the college’s support and trust in his teaching of biblical narrative in a non-theological manner.
“I will take little offroads to do some sort of theological explanation, but it’s not apologetics,” Jackson said. “I promised the college that they’ve done right by me.”
Unlike the online course, where producers film with two cameras from different angles, Jackson and Rognlie use one camera, with a tripod and lights. Every Friday, Jackson lectures from his office desk in his chair, with Rognlie behind the camera.
Jackson said he hopes to use the Substack to explore works like Euripides’ “The Bacchae,” especially a René Girardian reading; “Oedipus Rex;” “The Odyssey;” and more content from the Bible like Judges, the story of David, Job, and Ecclesiastes.
After finding the Substack through YouTube, Whitmore was shocked at the price of $5 a month for a subscription.
“It’s serious work, and these are the deepest questions about human nature that he’s getting out of Genesis, or whatever it is we’re reading,” Whitmore said. “But then at the same time, it’s very approachable and light and then genuinely funny. I remember most classes like really laughing about something. The Substack is like that — funny as hell.”
Rognlie said he would like to thank alumni Luke Robson ’17, Gabe Listro ’20, and Shadrach Strehle ’19 for helping them launch the Substack.
Whitmore said he is very grateful to Jackson for offering his wisdom and scholarship to the world.
“It’s better content than anything I’ve seen on YouTube,” Whitmore said. “That way of reading and becoming aware of your own reading, and then becoming self conscious about it and then to do that with the most important literature for us — that’s the most worthwhile kind of thing to do in our intellectual life.”
