Under a broad pop-culture umbrella, using icons from music, literature, film, the media, and politics, David Dark hopes to provide fodder for lively conversation about what it means to be Christian and American in this “weird moment” in which we live. It is a moment when we are increasingly polarized along political and religious lines, a moment when we are too busy forming our response to listen to the one who is speaking. And yet we claim more than ever to be one nation, under God. What does all this mean?
Dark shows us examples from America’s rich cultural history—from the writing of Faulkner and Melville to the music of Bob Dylan and R.E.M. to the social witness of Dorothy Day and Will Campbell—to help us understand how we might become our better selves. The end result, he hopes, will be a better understanding that “there is a reality more important, more lasting, and more infinite than the cultures to which we belong,” the reality of the kingdom of God.
“My own hope is to testify, in some small way, concerning a larger order than what we usually sense in our maddest moments, a kingdom coming (and somehow already here) on earth as it is in heaven. If I might only provoke the suspicion that there is a reality more important, more lasting, and more infinite than the cultures we inhabit and the most expensively publicized, perceived self-interest of the nation in which we find ourselves, I will be very pleased. It might be a relief. It might slow a pulse. It might even be good news.”
