I cannot say enough good things about this book. Phenomenal. A great exploration of humility and confidence in the context of faith. Any book that quotes Jon Stewart and Augustine in the same chapter is worth a look, don't you think?
AE

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Product Description

In this provocative, entertaining book, author David Dark writes, “The summons to sacred questioning, like a call to honesty, like a call to prayer, is a call to be true and to let the chips fall where they may.” Far from being a sign of cynicism or weakness, questions are not only positive but crucial for our health and well-being.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #134056 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780310286189
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Questions make new worlds possible, asserts author Dark (The Gospel According to America), a key premise in this thought-provoking meander of reflections on, and challenges for, living an engaged life of authentic Christianity. The well-read author draws insight and inspiration from a broad range of sources—Shakespeare, Ursula Le Guin, Johnny Cash and James Joyce—in calling into question the status quo, received history and conventional theology. Dark brings to his writing the kind of energy, offbeat enthusiasm and commitment to relevance that must make his high school English classes exciting places for inquiry and exploration. That each page yokes keen observation to practical application with wisdom and compassion inclines the reader to forgive the book's bewildering organization and abstruse section headings. Questions for further conversation at the end of each chapter will be useful for groups eager to put Dark's appeals into action. The author's passion for social justice, clarity about the sacred obligation of taking nothing at face value and confidence that unsettling questions yield rich rewards for both individuals and communities is convincing and moving. (Apr.)
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From the Publisher
What Other Authors and Friends Are Saying:

David Dark is my favorite critic of the people's culture of America and the Christian faith. He brings a deep sense of reverence to every book he reads, every song he hears, every movie he sees, but it is a discerning reverence--attentive to truth and Jesus wherever he comes on them. He is also a reliable lie detector. And not a dull sentence in the book.
Eugene Peterson, professor emeritus of spiritual theology, translator of The Message

David Dark is one of our wisest authors, and I plan to read everything he writes. The Sacredness of Questioning Everything will comfort questioners, doubters, and skeptics with assurance that their questions can be faithful, and it will challenge the complacent with an ethical summons to wonder. It invites everything to give life--and faith--a second thought, and did I mention that it's beautifully written?
Brian McLaren, author of Everything Must Change

Brilliant and charming and insightful as always, Dark comforts both my soul and my mind with this synthesis, part memoir and part essay, of the culture around us and the culture within us.
Phyllis Tickle, author of The Great Emergence

We will never find the answers until we begin to ask the right questions. Most of us are skeptical of self-righteous folks (whether pastors or politicians) who try to force their answers into you as if truth was an enema. And if there is anything we can learn from both liberals and conservatives, it's that you can have all the right answers and still be mean people. This is not a book of answers. Here is a book of questions--question everything ... including this book.
Shane Claiborne, author of The Irresistible Revolution and Jesus for President, activist, and recovering sinner

This is what I need: a far-reaching Christianity that's not just for the Shiny Happy People but for me, questioning and doubting and trying to live into the mystery. I couldn't ask for a better fellow pilgrim than brainiac David Dark, who feels as comfortable mining The Office and The Colbert Report as he does Dostoevsky and Flannery O'Connor. This book is for everyone who quietly suspects that God is a whole lot bigger than the church would have us believe.
Jana Riess, author of What Would Buffy Do?

In The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, David Dark serves up a unique blend of pop culture and high culture, generously seasoned with religious texts. The result is an immensely readable, profoundly subversive, and deeply prophetic book.
Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power

In The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, David Dark travels the lonesome highways of the American soul and finds signs of grace where many of us see only despair. Carry this book with you as a guide through these uncertain times.
Charles Marsh, author of Wayward Christian Soldiers

David Dark is a brilliant and respected cultural critic, and here, in this new work, he has done something that very few evangelical writers have done: he truly invites us--no, he calls us--to the holy task of thinking all manner of things through, of saying yes and no, of questioning and seeking and discerning what is most true. We need this kind of feisty, literate, and (dare I say it?) prophetic call, and we will be better--as people and as a Christian community and as a culture--if we take up this unsettling and liberating challenge.
Byron Borger, owner of Hearts & Minds bookstore, Dallastown, Pennsylvania

Dark wanders through the landscape of theological inquiry with brilliance, taking us into uncharted valleys where questioning, confusion, doubt, and promise intermingle. This book is a call to action, a resounding yell of encouragement, to all types of Christians.
Christopher R. Smit, assistant professor, Calvin College

From the Back Cover
Is Your God Big Enough to Be Questioned? The freedom to question is an indispensable and sacred practice that is absolutely vital to the health of our communities. According to author David Dark, when religion won’t tolerate questions, objections, or differences of opinion, and when it only brings to the table threats of excommunication, violence, and hellfire, it obstructs our ability to think, empathize, and live lives of authenticity and genuine engagement. The God of the Bible not only encourages questions; the God of the Bible demands them. If that were not so, we wouldn’t live in a world of such rich, God-given complexity in which wide-eyed wonder is part and parcel of the human condition. The possibility of redemption and revolution depends on the questions we ask of God, governments, media, and everyday economies. It is by way of the questions that we resist the conformity that deadens and come alive to visions that redeem.

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Customer Reviews

The Sacredness of Questioning Everything
Every once in a while, I encounter a book that breathes life into me by the way it communicates profound truth. The interesting thing is that books like this almost always take me by surprise. Zondervan sent me David Dark's new book, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, with the request that I review it if I liked it. I had heard of Dark, but had never read anything by him. The title intrigued me, so I opened to the table of contents...which intrigued me all the more:

Table of Contents
1. Never What You Have In Mind--Questioning God
2. The Unbearable Lightness of Being Brainwashed--Questioning Religion
3. Everybody to the Limit--Questioning Our Offendedness
4. Spot the Pervert--Questioning our Passions
5. The Power of the Put-On--Questioning Media
6. The Word, The Line, The Way--Questioning Our Language
7. Survival of the Freshest--Questioning Interpretations
8. The Past Didn't Go Anywhere--Questioning History
9. We Do What We're Told--Questioning Governments
10. Sincerity As Far As The Eye Can See--Questioning the Future
End Note: That Means To Signal a World Without End

That was enough to get me to start reading immediately. Halfway through the first chapter I was hooked. Dark artfully articulates faith in the context of what Lesslie Newbigin calls "A Proper Confidence"...faith that is not (cannot be) the equivalent of certainty...faith that recognizes our finite nature, our tendency to re-craft God in our own images and religion into self-justifying dogma. At times, he seems to be virtually channeling Kierkegaard in the context of 21st century Western culture. Dark offers us a thing of beauty, a life-giving breath of fresh air. His book invites us to take God a lot more seriously by taking ourselves a lot less seriously. Drawing from diverse voices (from Augustine and Aquinas to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to U2 and Arcade Fire) and various disciplines (Theology, Philosophy, Literature, Film, Music, etc.), he revives the Biblical tradition of questioning...as an act of humility in the pursuit of truth. He calls for us to cut through the propaganda, and resist any "powers that be" that would seek to subvert or co-opt the Way of Jesus. He beckons us to journey down a path that is characterized by faith, hope, and love (rather than certainty).
Pick up this book. You won't be disappointed.
AE

Stimulating challenge to question
One of the many memorable phrases found a couple of times in David Dark's new book; "The Sacredness of Questioning Everything" is related to the difficulty "to try to want to know what I don't want to know." It is the antithesis of having things figured out and being very comfortable with that that you very much. It's about digging deeper and exploring possibilities that might be foreign, inconvenient or even contrary to that place from which I operate. It is a rigorous exercise in humility and searching.

As the title states this is all about questioning; everything. The book has 10 chapters each a main focus of questioning; God, religion, media, our "offendedness", history and others. Throughout the book questions related to these "topics" are explored. But through each chapter more questions come up and the end of each chapter has even more questions to provoke discussions. This is a healthy and invigorating practice that Dark is encouraging.

I'm not as familiar with some of the literary figures or works he cites. However, in this I was simply introduced to interesting people, music, history or books I have begun to check out for myself. It is easy not to question. It may be a natural tendency to gravitate toward community where similarities are more prevalent than dissent or diversity but it can be unhealthy, self-perpetuating and dangerous. If I cannot question, as Dark gives me opportunity to in his book, what I currently believe about God, religion, history, governments or ideas is it possible I have tipped my hand? Am I really as certain about things as I would like to be? If I take myself so seriously as to think I cannot say "I don't know" without sliding into thinking I cannot know anything, I suffer from some god-complex. Just because I question something does not mean I will not continue to believe what I have come to believe. Either I will believe more firmly, find corrective adjustments to my thinking and living or reject a bad idea altogether. I may simply need to rethink the presentation of my ideas and the way I communicate.

The tone of the book is stimulating, entertaining, and enlightening and Dark's humor, expansive understanding of his subject matter and related facets and his apparent affection for the reader keep this from getting bogged down into a finger-shaking, question-for-the-sake-of-questioning exercise. I found myself challenged by this engaging author and take him at his word when I question even the ideas he presents in his book.

Essential reading
David Dark is such a careful and generous writer, and his latest is no exception. He manages to weave in so many disparate sources and ideas into one cohesive whole. It really comes and gets you where you live. It's unsettling in it's questions but it's also a post-culture war balm--it's valuable for evaluating culture in general, perfectly timed to feed us questions about our role and relationship with capitalism. I read the first chapter and then started over, I was so awed. In many ways, it's the most radical thing I have read in ages, a paradigm shifting inspiration, a gutting justice-loving Apologetic. Secondly, it opens with a paraphrased Prince quote and praises Patti Smith and Richard Pryor as prophetic voices--it's very of the world, Dark is a voracious listener and observer.

If you grew up being saddled with a mean god, burdened by a religion that was not your own, there is a lot here for you. If you have felt exhausted and bullied by right-wing Christian propaganda anytime since Reagan took office, there is a lot here for you, too.