ABOUT

 

 

Daniel Antoine Corones was born and raised in La Villette, in Marseille’s 3rd arrondissement—undoubtedly the city’s poorest and most cosmopolitan neighborhood. His paternal and maternal roots trace back to Spain (Huesca), Italy (Genoa), Sardinia, and Corsica. After immigrating, his mother’s family lived in the small Marseille community of “La Villette,” surrounded by the sound of guitars played by Catalan Gypsies, Spanish, Italian, and North African immigrants.

 

Daniel experienced the exclusion and marginalization typical of an idle urban youth. Part of his childhood was spent amid concrete apartment buildings and delinquency. After working as an entertainer in clubs and nightclubs in Switzerland and France, he returned to school to train as a nursing assistant (caregiver) and then as a dog handler (dog handler). Around the age of twenty, through a deep friendship with an Irish missionary named Samuel Gibson, Daniel discovered the faith. It was through a genuine spiritual experience that his life was transformed. He then strove to lead a stable and honest life. Although he had dropped out of school in 6e (equivalent to Grade 7 in Canada), he nevertheless embarked on theological studies (three years at the Geneva Bible Institute, one year at the Jean Calvin Faculty in Aix-en-Provence, and one year at the Faculty of Theology in Strasbourg).

 

For 17 years, Daniel served as a traveling speaker throughout the French-speaking world, a radio host, and pastor of a small parish in the city of Grasse (Alpes-Maritimes). For four years, he served as a Protestant chaplain at the Grasse Detention Center, where he passionately ministered to inmates from the Traveler community. Beginning in 2009, through frequent visits to the United States and his involvement with a missionary organization based in Flagstaff, Arizona, he discovered the Navajo people, and later, in Canada, the Innu and Atikamekw peoples. Since then, his love for First Nations has taken root within him. So deeply moved by their history and at the same time outraged by the way these peoples were mistreated by institutionalized religion, the First Nations and their ancestral culture have also become a passion for his family (Isabelle, Samuel-Angelo, and Marie-Ève). Their beliefs, their lives, and their so-called “religious” commitments have been completely transformed as a result.

 

Since 2017, Daniel and his family have been living among the Atikamekw people in Haute-Mauricie, and it is through this community that they are gaining a new perspective on history and spirituality. Daniel and his family have embraced a culture different from their own, as much of their experience with Christianity stems from five centuries of colonization, land seizures, forced conversions, and abuses of all kinds. What a waste! 

 

Daniel firmly believes that simplicity, true love, and the fundamental values taught by Jesus Christ should have been shared with respect for cultural expressions and languages, without any institutional pressure, dogmatism, or hidden agenda. Today, Daniel demonstrates that it is possible to live an authentic, relational faith—far from institutional machinery, without opportunism or religious progressivism, and without statistics on conversions, baptisms, and healings.

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