Virginia Seminar Project: Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious
David Dark is an assistant professor at Belmont University who also teaches at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. A resident of Nashville, Tennessee, he attempts to raise children and live a life of mindfulness with singer/songwriter Sarah Masen. Follow David on Twitter @DavidDark.
A Concise Dictionary of Religion and Pop Culture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, forthcoming)
The Sacredness of Questioning Everything
The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea
Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons
Don’t Stop Believin’: Pop Culture and Religion from Ben-Hur to Zombies
Co-Authored with Craig Detweiler, Robert K. Johnston, et al.
Joshua Neds-Fox’s review of The Sacredness of Questioning Everything in The Englewood Review of Books.
Virginia Ramey Mollenkott review of The Sacredness of Questioning Everything in Christian Feminism Today.
C. Christopher Smith’s review review of The Sacredness of Questioning Everything in Relevant Magazine.
Online Articles
“Flipping the Script When Responding to Hostility,” The High Calling (April 26, 2015).
“What Must I Do to Be Born Again?: The Open Hands of Kendrick Lamar,” Pitchfork (March 26, 2015).
“Experiments in Sincerity,” Killing the Buddha (December 21, 2009).
Anthology Chapters
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being Michael: The Religious Witness of Michael Jackson” in Michael Jackson: Grasping the Spectacle, edited by Christopher Smith, 2012.
“The Eraser: Start Making Sense” in Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive, edited by Brandon W. Forbes and George A. Reisch, 2009.
David Dark is an assistant professor at Belmont University and the author of The Sacredness of Questioning Everything (Zondervan, 2009); Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons and Other Pop Culture Icons (Baker Books, 2002) and The Gospel According To America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea (Westminster John Knox 2005), which was included in Publishers’ Weekly’s top religious books of 2005. He also contributed a chapter to the book Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive (Chicago: Open Court, 2009). Following years of teaching high school English, Dark recently received a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. He also teaches at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. A resident of Nashville, Tennessee, he attempts to raise children and live a life of mindfulness with singer/songwriter Sarah Masen.
What is your favorite book (or two or few)?
Ursula K. Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
Lewis Hyde, The Gift
Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
What is your favorite book to require for classes you teach?
Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
What are some of your favorite classes to teach? Why?
Religion and science fiction. They’re the bookends of just about everything I can think of.
Who are the authors you most admire?
Will Campbell, Octavia Butler, Mary Ruefle, Czeslaw Milosz, Gregory Orr, Thomas Merton, Guy Davenport, Robert Bellah, Flannery O’Connor, Albert Camus, Eugene Peterson, Dorothee Soelle, W.E.B. Dubois, Thomas Pynchon and Wendell Berry.
Who are your teaching/writing influences?
Doris Dark, Henri Nouwen and Parker Palmer.
Share a writing quirk.
Writing a letter, an essay, a chapter or a book serves well to assure me that all my notes and underlinings (or most of them) don’t go completely to waste. I try to be a good steward of my obsessive compulsions.