Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious
by David Dark
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Pub Date Feb 15 2016 | Archive Date Apr 06 2016
InterVarsity Press | IVP Books
Description
The ease with which we put the label on others without applying it to ourselves is an evasion, a way of avoiding awareness of our own messy allegiances. Dark writes: "If what we believe is what we see is what we do is who we are, there's no getting away from religion."
Both incisive and entertaining, Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious combines Dark's keen powers of cultural observation with candor and wit. Equal parts memoir and analysis, Dark persuasively argues that the fact of religion is the fact of relationship. It's the shape our love takes, the lived witness of everything we're up to for better or worse, because witness knows no division.
Looking hard at our weird religious background (Dark maintains we all have one) can bring the actual content of our everyday existence—the good, the bad and the glaringly inconsistent—to fuller consciousness. By doing so, we can more practically envision an undivided life and reclaim the idea of being "religious."
Advance Praise
—Nathan Schneider, columnist for America magazine, author of God in Proof and Thank You, Anarchy
"Don't let an aversion toward that radioactive word dissuade you. Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious is a bracing manifesto for modern people and an optimism-infused love song to humanity. David Dark calls us to pay better, more generous attention to our own lives and the lives of others."
—Sara Zarr, National Book Award finalist, author of The Lucy Variations
"David Dark is one of our most astute and necessary cultural critics. His work gracefully opens new doors of understanding and breaks down barriers between secular and non-, and it puts a lot of old mythology out to pasture with a daring affirmation at the heart of his radical critique. Life's Too Short refreshingly ropes everyone in, insisting that we're all in it together. We forget that."
—Jessica Hopper, author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic
"Effectively skewering a central fallacy of the age, David Dark argues that at the deepest level no one is more or less religious than anyone else. With his premise granted, new avenues for ownership, responsibility and a renewed attentiveness to all we say, do and think arise. Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious is a call to consciousness and the compassion that accompanies the sacred insight that the whole world is kin and everything belongs."
—Richard Rohr, O.F.M., Center for Action and Contemplation, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780830844463 |
| PRICE | $20.00 (USD) |
Links
Average rating from 6 members
Featured Reviews
Rebecca F, Reviewer
What a fantastic title. Etymologically, the word “religion” means to bind together again. Simply put, Dark’s thesis is that we’re all connected: we are in relationship with the people around us and can’t pretend otherwise. What we need is a shared vision for our shared life, and that involved engaging with other people. No pie-in-the-sky theology here; Dark affirms Daniel Berrigan’s assertion that “the actual world is our only world,” so things like climate change, gun control, immigration, and foreign policy are religious issues because they affect us all in this life. Together we have to imagine another story that isn’t capitalism and American imperialism as usual. Our practices don’t always match up with our convictions, but there is no such thing as a silent prophet.
We’re in it for the long haul, Dark says, so we owe it to each other (our “chother,” he writes, appropriating his son’s misunderstanding in a way reminiscent of John Irving’s “undertoad”) to pay attention, to really be here and see what we’re seeing rather than giving in to the shallowness and impatience that technology encourages. To that end, Dark recommends keeping an “attention collection” of experiences and artwork, but really what he’s talking about is mindfulness. Although it’s clear that Dark is coming from a Christian perspective, any ideology could be included under his basic definition of religion as a belief system.
Two of Dark’s models are Wendell Berry and Thomas Merton. There was a long chapter about science fiction (Dr. Who, etc.) that lost me a bit, and I thought Dark’s prose was marked by overly complicated sentences and too many quotations from other writers, but I felt his overall message was worthwhile. Here are a couple representative passages:
Poetry happens when I’m made to really see something I’ve overlooked, something needful, something that might bring me back to myself.
I take it to be a provocatively countercultural and commonsensical call to not be in perpetual flight, to not be always elsewhere in mind and spirit, reaching after the false promise of one more immortality project. It’s a call to make instead that rare saving choice to be more alive to where you are situated, to be more radically present
[Dark is married to singer-songwriter Sarah Masen, a name that might ring a bell for those who were into Christian music in the late 1990s.]
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Christian, Parenting & Families, Religion & Spirituality
