Crushes and Questions

I’m not going to skirt around the issue; I have a crush on David Dark. The man teaches high school English at a Christian school somewhere out East, causing me to curse the class-scheduling gods for not allowing me the chance to sit in his English class five days a week somewhere in my high school days, soaking up the wisdom he would have endowed on me. His book, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything is his third and, in my opinion, his best.

I saw him speak a couple times at a conference at Calvin University my sophomore year of college. I was taken up by his Southern drawl (he’s originally from the South), accompanied by his slow thoughts that eventually morph into brilliant new perspectives on familiar subjects. And this is why I appreciate the man so much, he has a way of looking at books, music, movies, politics, religion, etc and finds a way to redeem what I simply see as typical, and pulls out spiritual insights that are relevant and devastating to my ordinary point of view.

In The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, David Dark focuses on ten, for lack of a better term, subjects. Ranging from God to Government to Our Passions, a rather full spectrum is included in Dark’s analysis. While commenting on Religion, he says, “Religion is born out of questions, not answers. Only a twisted, unimaginative mind-set resists awe in favor of self-satisfied certainty” (22). It is with this mindset that Dark approaches the list of subjects, all the while using cultural references (both popular and otherwise) as well as Biblical back-up (although this is by no means a hermeneutical Bible lesson) to convey his points.

I had plans to go a bit more in depth but I realize that I’d just end up quoting the whole book and, because it covers a variety of topics, I would not be able to adequately summarize much else. So I’ll just end with the recommendation to get a hold of a copy of this book and read it.