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Articles by David Dark
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Katherine would be embarrassed if our admiration of her distracted us from other wounded households....She was a champion for others, and among the first to recognize when someone is isolated and lacking support, burdened by shame, therefore honoring Katherine compels us to remember a 7th family, equally wounded in the loss of someone dear to them. We count on the Lord and our community to support them generously, extravagantly, and to offer them the hope that sustains.
Book World: 'Armageddon' reads the Book of Revelation with fresh eyes
Simon & Schuster. 250 pp. $27.99 - - - "I was dreamin' when I wrote this," Prince once observed. "Forgive me if it goes astray." That's quite the preemptive flex. Do you approve of what follows in "1999"? Lions in pockets? Everybody having a bomb? Judgment Day? It was all written while dreaming. Complain about a dream if you must, but that's on you. There's no running from revelation. Dreams resist explanation. The Bible is full of them.
‘Armageddon’ reads the Book of Revelation with fresh eyes
There are two possible attitudes towards Scripture. One is to regard it as the direct and infallible word of God. This leads to certain problems. The …
They're choosing violence.
Realization: We've given the power of public office and armed force to people who believe they're carrying out God's will when they terrorize their neighbors. It seems they don't actually think of us as their neighbors. Unless I’m missing something, many of them think of us as their enemies and God's. They think we're killing babies and should stop. They think we're gay and should stop. They think we're “woke” and should stop.
Interaction
Editor’s Note: Readers of Dark Matter may recall my friend and neighbor, Lynne McFarland. I shared some of her writing a while back (“Let’s Break Free”) a while back. Here’s a sampling still achingly relevant: “So here we are in Tennessee. Getting ready to set ourselves on fire, denying our wholeness, in the process of self-destruction, and hollering ‘yee-haw’ as we go down.” I love her voice.
Expand the Space of the Talkaboutable
Maria Browning and Margaret Renkl have been very kind to me. Maria reviewed The Sacredness of Questioning Everything with Chapter 16 in 2009, and Margaret gave me my first review assignment there about five years ago. Since then, I’ve experienced Chapter 16 as a lovely outpost of thoughtfulness right here in Tennessee. Casey Cep of the New Yorker wrote about it a couple years back. I was extremely grateful to be quoted.
In Which I Explain Myself
When I stopped working at Christ Presbyterian Academy in 2007 and enrolled at Vanderbilt, I entered a community of thoughtful people I’m still getting to know. One of my favorites was (and is) Dr. David Dault. He’s one of my favorite thinkers in the world. He also hosts an extraordinary podcast. Here’s one that involves me. I get to talk about my family, my teaching, and my attempt to assume responsibility for the abusive behavior of my elected officials.
Review: In ‘Reorganized Religion,’ a veteran religion writer considers the changing church
"REORGANIZED RELIGION: THE RESHAPING OF THE AMERICAN CHURCH AND WHY IT MATTERS" by Bob Smietana (Worthy Publishing, 256 pages, $27). Whether he's covering Dave Ramsey, Beth Moore, Southern Baptists or snake handlers, Bob Smietana knows how to narrate the cult in the word culture. This is to say he's a religion reporter. Formerly the religion writer for The Tennessean and a senior editor of Christianity Today, he is currently a national reporter for Religion News Service.
Nuance Is Our Only Hope
THE FORCES OF NUANCE ARE ADVANCING. That’s the title I had in mind for this post before I settled on “Nuance Is Our Only Hope.” I believe nuance is our only hope. But I do not always believe in my heart that the forces of nuance are advancing. I find it easier to believe they are when I read or talk to the man in the above photo. His name is Bob Smietana. Bob is something of a legend when it comes to telling difficult stories with dignity.
How We Divide Determines What We See
The thing where we sit quietly as someone drops words like “the left” or “woke” or “groomers” as if they’re still speaking as safe, responsible, and self-respecting adults is a thing people like me need to stop doing immediately. Silence, in these instances, is complicity. Please read Heidi Beedle’s on the ground reporting concerning what appears to have been a domestic terror attack in Colorado Springs.
A Veteran Religion Writer Considers the Changing Church
Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why It Matters By Bob Smietana Worthy Publishing 256 pages, $27 Whether he’s covering Dave Ramsey, Beth Moore, Southern Baptists or snake handlers, Bob Smietana knows how to narrate the cult in the word culture. This is to say he’s a religion reporter. Formerly the religion writer for The Tennessean and a senior editor of Christianity Today, he is currently a national reporter for Religion News Service.
What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Twitter?
I will doubtless have more to say on the subject in the days to come, but I’m watching my relationship with the thing called Twitter change and I’d like to offer a few words and images. I hopped on years ago as a way of heeding the counsel of my literary agent. By securing “@DavidDark” early, I was given to understand that I’d have one more platform for marketing my content. This was true.
Power to Harm and to Heal
Whether he’s covering Dave Ramsey, Beth Moore, Southern Baptists, or snake handlers, Bob Smietana knows how to narrate the cult in the word culture. This is to say he’s a religion reporter. Formerly the religion writer for The Tennessean and a senior editor of Christianity Today, he is currently a national reporter for Religion News Service.
Embodied Solidarity Is The Human Future
It gives me great joy to remind you that Belmont is hosting Dr. Larycia Hawkins this Friday (10/27/22) with two public events. It’s all a part of our still-underway Transformative Justice series. The first is a public conversation with Dr. Hawkins at 10AM in the Massey Performing Arts Center. Parking is available for visitors just across the street from MPAC in front of the Bunch Library.
A Fellowship for Aspiring Book Critics
Humanities Tennessee founded Chapter 16 in 2009 in the belief that criticism and reporting on the literary world are essential to our cultural conversation. In the interest of making that conversation more inclusive, we're delighted to announce the Humanities Tennessee Fellowship in Criticism, an opportunity for a writer from a marginalized community to receive support and guidance in pursuing arts journalism focused on books.
Anthony Ray Hinton’s The Sun Does Shine Comes to Young Readers
Injustice isn’t an accident. As Nashville-based psychologist and author Christina Edmondson once observed, “Decisions create culture.” That three-word aphorism, applied personally and publicly, can go a long way toward getting a fix on fate, even arresting — and possibly reversing — the sinking feeling of the inevitable. If decisions create culture, perhaps what is isn’t what has to be.
Autumn Is Almost Here
Fall officially arrives this Thursday, September 22, and that means it's time to start storing up books for the winter — right? Okay, most of us already have a well-stocked TBR pile (or two, or three), but you can never have too many books. Everybody knows that. And there's always a new book (or one that's new to you) just waiting to take you someplace you didn't know you needed to go.
Toward Justice
Injustice isn’t an accident. As Nashville-based psychologist and author Christina Edmondson once observed, “Decisions create culture.” That three-word aphorism, applied personally and publicly, can go a long way toward getting a fix on fate, even arresting — and possibly reversing — the sinking feeling of the inevitable. If decisions create culture, perhaps what is isn’t what has to be.
Chagall Guevara & The Nashville Nexus
I give a lot of thought to how the doors of perception get held open. There’s affirmation. There’s art. There’s well-timed nods. There’s finding something or someone familiar or wonderfully weird and then going to the trouble of risking something in an attempt to get in on the act (or the scene) you see going on. There’s also finding something or someone beautiful and…the desire to be nearer to the beauty. The longing to belong to the beautiful and the beloved. To be beloved. To be beheld.
Record of the Week: Chagall Guevara's 'Halcyon Days'
If you were a fan of live, alternative rock in Nashville in the early nineties, you knew of the band Chagall Guevara. Yes, the name is a conscious conjuring of an aesthetic and an ethic that fuses the painter Marc Chagall and the revolutionary, military theorist Che Guevara together. Think surrealist guerilla artfare. Chagall Guevara was big in Nashville, because Nashville hosted, as it often has, myriad forms of high weirdness. Opryland still existed. Bongo Java did not.
Evangelical Anxiety
If you’re like me, you’ve had some strange and unexpected conversations over the last few years. I never imagined I’d spend hours on the phone with former students discussing whether or not they should leave their kids alone with their parents or, in one instance, if it would be prudent and appropriate to contact the F.B.I. concerning what their dad (and friends of their dad) might be planning to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in Washington, D.C., but here we are. Welcome to Nashville.
The Voice Of The Shadows
Satan has been called a snake. Better he had been called a chameleon. For Satan is never quite the same from moment to moment, but changes his colors according to circumstances. How Satan appears to us will then be at least in part a function of how we have responded to the choices set before us.
Team Normal
Who is the arbiter of mental health? —Governor Bill Lee I’m standing now, but I can sit, whatever. I want to be fully compliant. So whatever they want me to do, I’ll do. —Nicholas Roske We’re good. —Tucker Carlson All forms of media will tank if I'm not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes. —Public Servant 45 One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
Making Believe
“It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to be believed.” This grim adage comes from Alexander Nix, former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that once served the presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. What the average Joe calls lying, influence peddlers call winning. Conscience, in such contexts, is a show of weakness. The threat unprincipled parties pose to an anxious and despairing populace is nothing new.
Spiritual Formation & The Berrigan Witness
At first blush, Daniel Berrigan can seem a strange figure to bring to the task of spiritual formation. In the popular configuration of spirituality as somehow usually to the side of the questions we sequester away with words like “political,” “business,” “public,” “private,” “ecological,” or “economic,” it can be difficult to reckon with a poet priest who burned draft files on camera while reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the height of the Vietnam war.
Fear No Book
It is a part of our office to stand uncloaked, masked, sword bared, upon the scaffold for a long time before the client is brought out. Some say this is to symbolize the unsleeping omnipresence of justice, but I believe the real reason is to give the crowd a focus, and the feeling that something is about to take place.
An enlivening alternative to Rod Dreher’s Benedict option
Patrick Henry offers a nuanced interpretation of how monasticism can offer a compelling critique of—and an alternative to—contemporary culture. In contrast to Rod Dreher’s doctrinaire assertion of the Benedict Option, Henry urges “Benedictine options” in which monasticism is not monolithic and culture is neither irredeemably bad nor completely without fault. The Benedictine monasticism that Henry describes reflects the wisdom of the Rule of St. Benedict, which is moderate and inviting.
Concerning Beloved
I don’t know who made the decision to make Memory Law legislation a part of the Republican party’s brand, but I’m hopeful that the appearance of Toni Morrison’s Beloved in Virginia’s governor’s race will send more people down the path of reading it. Beloved is like Moby Dick or Joshua Tree or Hamilton except more consequential. It’s deeply worrying that my governor and both my senators appear to have locked arms with others to militate against it.
Wolves in Shepherd’s Clothing
“Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged.” This hopeful aphorism from Albert Camus is one avenue for approaching the breathtakingly thorough and eye-rubbingly sad story Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez tells in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
The Moral Mercury of Life
“The penalty of deception is to become a deception, with all sense of moral discrimination vitiated. A man who lies habitually becomes a lie, and it is increasingly impossible for him to know when he is lying and when he is not. In other words, the moral mercury of life is reduced to zero.” These words come to us out of the wise witness of Howard Thurman who hailed from Daytona Beach, traveled widely, and eventually landed at Boston University.
Conduct Your Bloom
I sometimes think my entire vocation consists of trying to help people find themselves and others interesting and beautiful. In this activity, I have more than one mentor, but my favorite is my partner in crime and matrimony, Sarah Masen, who you’re also welcome to refer to as Sarah Dark. If you know her, I suspect you already love her. If you don’t, you would be well-served by an hour or two of research. She’s an artist with many forms.
Misplaced Deference
In recent years, I’ve become peculiarly sensitive to the phenomenon of misplaced deference, the move whereby I hand over to someone else my right and my ability to see and consider what’s in front of me. I’m beginning to believe that education is the the gradual overcoming of misplaced deference. Education is a life’s work. It came to mind today when Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas expressed regret for having banned local mask mandates.
The Possibility of America
Published in the years following 9/11, David Dark's book The Gospel According to America warned American Christianity about the false worship that conflates love of country with love of God. It delved deeply into the political divide that had gripped the country and the cultural captivity into which so many American churches had fallen. In our current political season, the problems Dark identified have blossomed.
Thank you, Reality Winner.
“In America you can say anything you want--as long as it doesn't have any effect." Paul Goodman Reality Winner has been released from prison. This is lovely. It would not be right to say that she’s free. Public Servant 45, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Marsha Blackburn, and Mitch McConnell are free.
Fear No Theory
According to family lore, my dad once walked into a Sunday School class where most everyone was complaining about the fact that a popular and allegedly obscene film was currently being screened in Nashville. "Have any of you seen it?" he asked. They admitted that none of them had. "Well I have," he said. "and y’all don't know what you're talking about." My dad knew how to touch a nerve, and I loved and admired him for it.
Silent Prophets
I once had a strange exchange with an older friend, the pastor of a large congregation, and it went a little something like this. We made small talk while keeping a watchful eye on children skateboarding. There was a lull. “I’m an advocate,” he said, breaking the silence. “Wait—That’s not the word.” I waited for the word. “I believe in climate change,” he said starting again, and I agreed that one would not want to self-identity as an advocate of climate change.
Calling Evangelicals to Account
When religion and politics, the twin abstractions, seem to come at us with endless, depressing news of fury and failure, it’s easy to want to reach for comforting caricatures in our common American history. Are things really as bad as they seem? The thought of following up on the facts of where we are and where we’ve been can feel like a dispiriting task when so many of us feel stupefied already. What do we do when we feel all historied out? Photo: Torrence L.
Weight of Glory
One’s humanity is not primarily an inheritance or a gift from on high. Living humanly has a price attached. Let us pay up, and gladly. Knowing as well that the opposite, living inhumanly, pays huge dividends in a crooked world.
Dumpster Fire
With William Blake, I believe we become what we behold. We emit what we admit. And the voices we use—or think we use—kindasorta become our voice. Kurt Vonnegut says we become what we pretend to be and advises us, then, to be very careful what we pretend to be. I say all this to say that I suspect we become what we do with our tools (or technology). And I say that to say that everyone reading this might do well to avoid the technology called Twitter like the plague.
Kayfabe
Learned a new word today. “Kayfabe” helps me get a better handle on what’s happening with folks who know that we have a white supremacist terror problem in our federal, state, and local governments and who know that Reality Winner has been cruelly and unusually punished and who know that the climate crisis is real but who haven’t figured out how they can publicly acknowledge these matters while maintaining the status and approval they’ve come to mistake for their actual lives.
Rush Limbaugh: Thought Leader
I remember really enjoying listening to Rush Limbaugh on my AM-only car radio while barreling down I-24 to get to philosophy class. He made me feel strong whenever I felt belittled by history, other people's thoughtfulness, & other forms of available data. He helped me believe my anxiety when confronted by the fact of other people was about them, not me. When I was tired of feeling outsmarted, he helped me feel smart again, like an espresso-shot of perceived righteousness.
Difference is the sunshine.
I thank God for Stephen Bradford Long. The poet Carolyn Forché speaks of opening “the book of what happened,” and I devote a lot of time to finding and studying people who are up to that rare and essential work. Stephen is peculiarly committed to this activity and his determination to hold his own experiences out with open hands is an inspiration to me. Here’s a recent offering I found myself reading today.
Make Repentance Great Again
Next Story An Essay By David Dark I was teaching high school English in Nashville when a parent tried to get me fired for declining to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Before it got to that point, the parent and I had a phone conversation, which I’d believed settled things. Having aired the concern to an administrator, the parent had been given my phone number.
There are no unsacred places.
Here’s what I take to be Wendell Berry’s theory of culture: “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” If I could only assign one sentence for a semester-long course, I think this might be the one. Berry’s words run through my mind as I contemplate this meditation on the last week by Diana Butler Bass. It’s as good as it gets.
Make Repentance Great Again
At the beginning of this century, a parent tried to get me fired for declining to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Before it got to that point, we had a phone conversation (in compliance with our handbook which cited Matthew 18:15) which I'd believed settled things. As we concluded, I said I'd love to talk more as time permits.
Ministry of Disinformation
Next week begins my 2021 attempt to teach a class called Religion and Science Fiction. If a sufficient number of people implore me to do so, I’ll feel sufficiently incentivized to share our required readings. Somewhere early on we’ll get to talking about disinformation, and I’ll offer this definition from Philip Kindred Dick: [Disinformation] is noise driving out signal.
White Supremacy & Weaponized Despair
Yes. This is a strange image to place before you as I introduce a conversation that occurred a couple of blocks away from the site of a recent anti-mask rally, but I have reasons. I am indeed David Dark of Nashville and Davidson County, but I’ve lived much of my life within Williamson County which includes Brentwood and Franklin. And some of the best days and nights of this life of mine occurred in a place called the Brentwood Three Cinema.
Elizabeth’s question to Mary at the Visitation is one for all of us.
A Reflection for the Fourth Monday of Advent Like most things in 2020, this will be an Advent unlike any other. But each day, you can still take a few minutes to reflect on the coming of our savior at Christmas with short reflections on Scripture, written by the staff of America Media. Subscribe to The Word in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast player and never miss a reflection.
Vatican: Catholics can get Covid-19 vaccines that used abortion cells
Nurse Melissa Valentin shows a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to be applied to medical personnel at the Ashford Presbyterian Community Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2020. (AP Photo / Carlos Giusti) VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican on Monday declared that it is “morally acceptable” for Roman Catholics to receive COVID-19 vaccines based on research that used fetal tissue from abortions.
The Beyondist Personality
A tweet from a local prophet got me thinking today. To offer a little context, there’s been a consistent effort to persuade Governor Bill Lee to behave like an equal among his constituents in Tennessee since the beginning of our pandemic. In partnership with our legislature’s Republican majority, his office ordered the Tennessee Highway Patrol to stand guard against citizens waiting to speak to him outside the Tennessee State Capitol at all hours and confiscate their supplies.
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