Western film and literature love the orphan. Peter Pan. Harry Potter. Anne of Green Gables. Oliver Twist. Jane Eyre. Luke Skywalker. Simba. Superman.

After identifying the plot and structure of the story, whether it is whole, bent, or broken, you can ask yourself and your students, what does the author portray in this story as good and as evil? Whatever the answer may be, you can write it in the space underneath the garden of New Creation.

The movie Backrooms (2026) proved that a 20-year old, Kane Parsons, with a small budget can make a more compelling film than Spielberg this summer. (Hint: don't bother watching Disclosure Day (2026)).

This is not a new storyline. Movies like Big (1988) or famous short stories like "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs follow similar plotlines. But this film’s cautionary message hit me hard: Human beings are terrible at judging what we really want and what’s best for us. The fallen heart often longs for things that will bring destruction. It's an argument for trusting God knows all things and is the embodiment of true, good, and beautiful.

A friend and filmmaker told me this week that "Project Hail Mary is the finest American film of the past two decades…" I was taken aback. Did we watch the same movie, I thought?

Today, we'll explore the first step in the Framing Stories approach - Listen to God's Echoes. Jerram Barrs refers to this presence in our stories as echoes of Eden. “It seems that among every people on the face of this earth,” he writes, “there is a recollection of the original good creation; there is awareness that the world we now live in is broken and fallen, and there is recall of the promise and hope of restoration of what is good” (Echoes of Eden, 74).

"Is this a joke on God?" That’s what a soldier says when he discovers a convent run by weed-growing nuns! And it's not the first odd subversion of Christian theology in One Battle After Another (2025).

Here is an approach to biblical integration pieced together through years of teaching and thinking called Framing Stories with God’s Story (or just Framing from now on). The goal of the Framing approach is to help you “see” the stories you’re thinking about against the backdrop of God’s Story. Like a set for a play, God’s Story frames the action on stage, placing the actors and their story in proper context.

Listed below are some of the movies I saw in 2025. They were also released in 2025, and I have ranked them from poorest to best.

A House of Dynamite (2025) traces a fictional day in which a nuclear missile is fired at the United States. No one knows who is responsible for the act of aggression and when the safety measures fail to stop it from barrelling to the states, the terrible question of “how” to respond is the question up for debate.