“Without a costly commitment to candor among family and potential friends, the possibility of truthful conversation (a prerequisite for the formation of more perfect unions) begins to tragically diminish, and responsible speech that communicates what we’re actually thinking and believing becomes a lost art.” - David Dark, The Gospel According to America.

So David Dark is one of my newest favorite writers. His mind-bending insistence on a biblically-based world view oriented by a commitment to bewilderment has, well, bent my mind. It seems appropriate to the content of his writing that my context for reading it has often been a squirmy, unavoidable sense of self-questioning generated by the act of standing up on the train with a book subtitled “Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea.” (Standing as, I guess I should note, a visibly queer, atheistic, “East Coast liberal” style NYC transplant. In other words not someone you would necessarily expect to be hip to Jesus.) And yet I can’t stop reading his book even long enough for one day’s commute—it lays out one of the most challenging and exhilarating conceptions of American identity that I’ve run into in a long time.

Here’s the article where I initially saw Dark’s name, found courtesy of author Jessica Hopper, who wrote it and The Girls Guide to Rocking, which Dark reviews on his blog… here. I like the circularity, the overlap, the messy internet humanity of the little transaction that brought me to his book. Having spent some time recently with Dark’s view of America, I think he might like it too.