Joel Wentz

speaker

149 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 8 Sep

Joel Wentz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Books and Big Ideas Audio (with Joel Wentz) · How (not) to Interpret Jesus · 8 Sep 2026 podcast

hey everyone my name is joel i am a voracious reader especially in the areas of theology philosophy religion history culture social commentary cultural theory those kinds of things i love books i love helping people find books i love advocating for reading in general i think reading is such a good thing that we need to preserve as a practice and so i devote this channel to

Yeah, talking about books, encouraging people to spend time with books.

I also, hopefully, my reviews help people find stuff they wouldn't have known about that is worth reading, or maybe avoid things that is not worth their time to read.

And so today, we're going to be talking about The Greatest Story Ever Retold.

This is a new release from Baker Academic.

So thank you, Baker, for sending me a copy for review.

I'm going to take you through my typical review format.

This is my honest response to this book.

I'm going to talk about what this book is doing, what this book does well, what this book could do better, and then I'll land on a reading recommendation, a final verdict.

So if that's all you want, just jump ahead to that.

And then a last invitation to consider before I get into this is if you want to be a channel member, I just ask people to consider supporting me at a dollar a month.

It helps me create some margin for doing the kind of work that I'm doing.

So if it's helpful to you, maybe that'd be worth thinking about.

But let's get into the review.

Okay, The Greatest Story Ever Retold is ostensibly about Jesus films, adaptations of the gospel stories into mostly movies, but occasional TV shows like, you know, The Chosen is the obvious popular one right now, at least as I'm recording this, but

It's about the translation of the Jesus story into the other medium of film, ostensibly.

But really, the book is more broadly just about the act of interpretation in general.

This is kind of a book on hermeneutics or interpretation smuggled in the packaging of a book about movies, which I think is really interesting.

So what the co-writers in this book are doing is they are...

walking the reader through reflections on what it means to interpret the Gospels even as a reader, let alone interpret the act of interpreting the Gospels into a different format, which is a movie.

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