Art by Danny Joe Gibson
No Sanctuary of the Cinema events are scheduled at this time, but watch this page for upcoming ones.
Course Overview
Sanctuary of the Cinema is a free film course that applies a Christian interpretive lens to a variety of films for the purposes of spiritual enrichment, cultural engagement, communal experience, and personal growth and development. Chad Thomas Johnston, author of Nightmarriage, and Jennifer Harris Dault, editor of The Modern Magnificat: Women Responding to the Call of God, cofounded the course at First Baptist Church of Springfield, Missouri, in 2005.
Chad transplanted the course to First Baptist Church of Lawrence during the Lenten season of 2009, screening Danish director Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast as the course’s first film. The class has explored faith in film in a variety of genres: Comedy (Hae-jun Lee’s Castaway on the Moon), Drama (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Le Fils), Documentary (Jessica Yu’s In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger), and Classic Cinema (Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd), among others.
Childcare is provided. Please take this opportunity to enjoy a fantastic film without any interruptions from your children—and free of charge, no less.
All features begin at 6:00 p.m. in the sanctuary at First Baptist Church, free admission. Film screenings followed by group discussion. Food and drink are permitted, and occasionally provided. Feel free to bring a friend, a snack to share, and lots of thoughts to share after the credits roll.
Instructor Chad Thomas Johnston is a slayer of word dragons who resides in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife Rebekah, their daughter Evangeline, and five felines. He has written for Image Journal‘s “Good Letters” blog, In Touch magazine, The Baylor Lariat, and CollapseBoard.com. Johnston’s first book, the whimsical memoir Nightmarriage, was a finalist for a 2013 Shirley You Jest! Book Award in nonfiction writing. He received his Master of Arts in Communication Studies from Missouri State University in 2003.
As a Lecturer in the Department of Communication at Missouri State University, Chad taught developed and taught his own intersession film coursework, including Communication and the New Emerging Superpower: A Dialog with China through Film, Asian Voices: Exploring Interpersonal Communication in Asian Films, The Passion of the Filmmaker: Investigating Christian Messages in Film, and Intercultural Communication and China: The Films of Zhang Yimou. He also developed and taught an online course for Drury University called A Survey of Intercultural Communication Through Film.
Chad can be reached at:
chad1978@gmail.com
Twitter: @Saint_Upid