Audiobooks by David Dark

We Become What We Normalize: What We Owe Each Other in Worlds That Demand Our Silence

From one of the most respected thinkers and public intellectuals of our day comes a book that is both a cultural critique of the state of our country and a robust summons to resist complicity. As we move through the world, we constantly weigh our conscience against what David Dark calls 'deferential fear'-going along just to get along, especially in relation to our cultural, political, and religious conversations. Dark reveals our compromised reality: the host of hidden structures and tacit social arrangements that draw us away from ourselves and threaten to turn us slowly into what we decry in others. We Become What We Normalize counsels a creative, slow, and artful response to the economy of reaction, hurry, shaming, and fearmongering. Dark offers a deep analysis of the ways our conceptions of ourselves and our use of technology often lead us away from what we believe, reinforcing the false narrative that we must humiliate others in order to survive. 'I suspect we become what we sit still for, what we play along with, and what we abide in our attempts to access more perceived power and more alleged influence,' Dark writes. We Become What We Normalize calls for a new kind of struggle, ethic, witness, and spirit that helps us step away from the infinite loop of normalizing harm into effecting true change for ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.

David Dark (Author), David Dark (Narrator)

Audiobook

Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious: Reframed and Expanded

We can't just be done with religion, argues David Dark. The fact of religion is the fact of us. Religion is the witness of everything we're up to-for better or worse. David Dark is one of today's most respected thinkers, public intellectuals, and cultural critics at the intersection of faith and culture. Since its original release, Dark's Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious has become essential reading for those engaged in the conversation on religion in contemporary American society. Now, Dark returns to his classic text and offers us a revised, expanded, and reframed edition that reflects a more expansive understanding, employs inclusive language, and tackles the most pressing issues of the day. With the same keen powers of cultural observation, candor, and wit audiences have come to know and love, Dark weaves in current themes around the pandemic and vaccine responses, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, critical race theory, and more. By looking intentionally at our weird religious background (we all have one), he helps us acknowledge the content of our everyday existence-the good, the bad, and the glaringly inconsistent. When we make peace with the idea of being religious, we can more practically envision an undivided life.

David Dark (Author), David Dark (Narrator)

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The Possibility of America: How the Gospel Can Mend Our God-Blessed, God-Forsaken Land

Published in the years following 9/11, David Dark's book The Gospel according to America warned American Christianity about the false worship that conflates love of country with love of God. It delved deeply into the political divide that had gripped the country and the cultural captivity into which so many American churches had fallen. In our current political season, the problems Dark identified have blossomed. The assessment he brought to these problems and the creative resources for resisting them are now more important than ever. Into this new political landscape and expanding on the analysis of The Gospel according to America, Dark offers The Possibility of America: How the Gospel Can Mend Our God-Blessed, God-Forsaken Land. Dark expands his vision of a fractured yet redeemable American Christianity, bringing his signature mix of theological, cultural, and political analysis to white supremacy, evangelical surrender, and other problems of the Trump era.

David Dark (Author), Bob Souer (Narrator)

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Sacredness of Questioning Everything

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.

David Dark (Author), John Patrick, John Patrick Walsh, Zondervan Publishing (Narrator)

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