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John Anthony Dunne and Jeannine K. Brown, The Greatest Story Ever Retold: Envisioning Jesus Narratives from Gospels to Film (Baker Academic, 2026)
In a bid to forestall the unthinking consumption of deceptively slick misrepresentations, many a pastor and parent issue knee-jerk prohibitions whenever the film industry offers a new take on Jesus. Suspicion of Hollywood’s tendency to play fast and loose with source material runs deep in those familiar with adaptations of classics like Jane Eyre—adaptions that discard or distort Christian themes. The Greatest Story Ever Retold: Envisioning Jesus Narratives from Gospels to Film admits to a few productions that egregiously distort the biblical record—as when Story of Judas (2015) reconfigured the traitor as a staunch believer who died of a broken heart following the Crucifixion. Our two authors’ primary goal, however, is confrontation of the unquestioned assumptions that shape viewers’ label-slapping tendencies.
Instead of encouraging us to anxiously categorize a given film as “unfaithful,” Bible professors John Dunne and Jeannine Brown encourage reexamination of the creative decisions we have already unthinkingly made in assembling our own mental reels of Jesus’ actions and words. Eurocentric illustrations, favorite translations, preferred gospels, and innumerable personal factors inform the golden standard playing in our imaginations. Admitting to the complex hermeneutic at work when we assess yet another (unbiblical) depiction of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute or (unhistorical) long-haired Jesus can slow our rush to judge another’s adaptation, allowing for patient evaluation and possible illumination.
Our authors convincingly argue that watching many Jesus films with a critical eye—from early, docetic films to more recent efforts that assign Jesus a range of human emotions—enriches understanding of our Savior by forcing us to confront the private, directorial decisions we regularly make when reading Scripture.
Jeff Crosby, World of Wonders: A Spirituality of Reading (Paraclete Press, 2025)
A reliance on algorithms tailored to our reading history generates more of the same when we’re seeking the next devotional or book club novel. Predictability admittedly has its place, providing a comforting respite from a capricious, broken world. However, World of Wonders: A Spirituality of Reading (2025), a collection of essays edited by Jeff Crosby, reminds us that we also benefit from books that introduce the unfamiliar or the contrary. Convinced that loving well requires reading widely, the writers assembled here provide apologias for reading across an array of topics and genres—along with a helpful list of suggested titles. Whatever a recommended book’s unique combination of instruction and entertainment, it also holds the potential to broaden our understanding of human experience, enabling more effective practice of godly virtues.
A stack of interrelated titles provides useful signposts during Edward Gilbreath’s imaginative journey into the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Engaging an array of literary voices committed to exploring the “dark chapters of our life together,” he holds, broadens our understanding of fraught historical events by complicating seductively simplistic metanarratives. The wonder in creation we regularly trade for image-heavy media posts returns when we read poems that slow us down “in lectio divina style,” writes Luci Shaw. Reading fictional masterworks like The Brothers Karamazov, notes Bob Fryling, can assist in spiritual formation as much as reading Christian classics by Blaise Pascal or G. K. Chesterton can. Whether we open a memoir amid grief or read essays thematically mapped onto the liturgical calendar, deliberative reading offers a promise of transformation.
G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday opens by suggesting its tale belongs to the recent past: a period when the anxiety Chesterton dramatizes befuddled the faithful. In the early 20th century, a moment when “science announced nonentity and art admired decay,” those fighting for honor often misconstrued the threat they faced. The struggle Chesterton proceeds to narrate captures the particular unease of those shaken by the “dynamite outrage[s]” of the late 19th century, but the tale’s observation about how misapplied mental powers can exacerbate anxiety carries perennial relevance.
Dynamite, first manufactured in 1887, quickly became the weapon of choice for anarchists in Ireland, France, and England wishing to make headlines. Fear was the goal, bloodshed the means. Published the year before Thursday, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent underscores how quickly even the sudden death of many becomes last week’s news. To really unsettle the public, Conrad’s foreign ambassador observes, life-ending violence needs to be “incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad.”
In Chesterton’s novel, delusion fed by such inexplicable violence is the true enemy. Worry about the nefarious machinations of those who threaten the rule of law prompts an admirable vigilance in a series of noble characters, but it also deceives those determined to find an easy target. Imagination, a gift when facilitating prayer and worship, just as easily generates deceptive mirages in Chesterton’s novel. The true battle, he reminds us, plays out in minds assaulted by yellow journalism and other tools of an Adversary bent on misdirection.
Paul Marchbanks is a professor of literature and film at California Polytechnic State University. His YouTube channel is “Digging in the Dirt.”
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