23 Quotes by David Dark

Religion isn't best understood primarily as a collection of beliefs held by backward people with fear and trembling for most of human history (religion as brainwash). It is rather, among other things, a scriptorium of beleaguered witness, a record of collated information, both fragmentary and sometimes systematic, with which we may feel compelled to reckon as it somehow, across history, reckons with us, an inheritance, if you like, of difficult wisdom.

And for the sake of humility--a characteristic crucial to sacred questioning we might do well to confess that we're capable at any moment of such bad religion ourselves.

I want them to think of being in church as being in the middle of a work of art, a collective witness of fellow human beings, wherever they are and whatever they're up to.

Because it's in the nature of a gift, the offering and the reception, to create relationship and to overcome that which divides, one can't remain in the way of the gift and also definitively disassociate. When a gift occurs, we see ourselves in others, our very lives sustained by the grace of others, and we find we can hardly hold ourselves apart. The gift occasions communion, that wholeness for which we're all longing in one way or another most of the time.

Feeling offended is invigorating. Feeling offended is a reassuring sensation. It's easier than asking ourselves if the redeeming love of God is evident in the way we communicate with people.

If we've deluded ourselves into thinking that our angry mass emails or conversation-stopping talking points serve as a ministry or carry out the purposes of God, we need to slow down and take a breath.

What the pundits call wishy-washiness, the Bible calls repentance.

Witness calls for withness, the complete opposite of detached observation... To receive the witness of another is to enter into a vision that isn't accessible to us in isolation; we realize ourselves as members of one another and feel compelled to act accordingly, finding that we can't easily live with ourselves if we don't.

The tension between what is and what ought to be drives the growls against hypocrisy and the satirization of the self-satisfied and uptight.