Dan Atchison

Husband. Father. Pastor. Educator. Storyteller. Traveller. Coffee snob. Street art connoisseur. Perpetual student.

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

The ache a good movie leaves you isn’t sentiment. It’s homesickness. You’re recognizing a story you’ve heard somewhere underneath all the others.

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

Wrote the whole thing up, plus four questions to watch with, and a poll: you pick the film I take all the way down next week. https://t.co/Q6ZgLYV6nQ

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

Tolkien had a word for the moment a story turns and saves everyone who had no right to be saved: eucatastrophe. The sudden joyous turn. The eagles come. The tomb is empty. He thought the Gospels held the greatest one, with one difference: it happened.

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

So the ache a good movie leaves in you isn’t sentiment. It’s recognition. You’ve heard this story before, somewhere underneath the ones you’re watching.

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

Watching a movie theologically isn’t hunting for a Jesus figure in every frame. It’s watching for the shape. Every rescue, every sacrifice, every undeserved love that wrecks you is borrowing that shape from one true Story.

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

I spent ten years making films before I came back to ministry. I know every trick that makes you cry in a dark theater. They still work on me. That’s not manipulation. It’s homesickness. We’re wired for a story we can’t yet see the end of.

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

Which one are you? I wrote the rest down this morning. The full essay is linked in my bio.

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

We read the prodigal son as the younger brother’s story. But Jesus told it to a room of religious insiders, and handed them two sons, not one.

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

The parable ends with the older brother outside the party, and the father out in the dark, begging him to come in. Jesus never tells us whether he goes inside. That ending is still ours to write.

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

Thin Places, on Truth and Wonder: https://t.co/L0eX1Yen1k

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

We think thin places are rare. A famous abbey. A holy site with a gift shop. I think we’ve got that backwards.

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

Maybe thin places aren’t rare destinations. Maybe they’re ordinary ground we walk past because we’re not paying attention. New piece, written from Ireland.

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

Prayer as a practice of attention, not a technique for getting things from God. Incredible article on prayer!

https://t.co/FXY9RZrkIg

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

This is the first piece in a new season on reading the signs: the art, films, and places that keep speaking when no one assigned them as Scripture. https://t.co/x8UKMSxv4o

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

I’m a pastor who loves street art. Even the illegal kind. And I’ve come to think graffiti is one of the most New Testament things I know.

[Dan Atchison @danatchison]

A tag is never only paint. It says: I exist. I was here. Do not erase me. And I can’t read that without hearing Scripture, where God says he’s engraved your name on the palms of his hands.