Truth is soft (so soft it bleeds when you push too hard)

Thanks to my friends in Reynosa, I just finished David Dark's book The Sacredness of Questioning Everything which talks about a characteristic of the softcore world: the need/desire to distill truth out of many sources. (Seminarians can skip down to the bottom of this post where I will geek-out a bit in our language.)

Dark's background required him to struggle against assumptions that come from being a particular brand of Christian, but his approach in overcoming those assumptions will resonate with anyone who lives in the softcore world. For Dark, the lyrics of Arcade Fire or Wilco, and episodes from The Office all offer insights into Christian truth, insights that are particularly important because they stand outside the traditions that had locked him (and others like him) into bad understandings of God and the Bible.

If you have been wondering why certain movies or bands are "just so good", look up The Sacredness of Questioning Everything.

Seminary Geeks: Dark essentially restates Grant Osborne's "hermeneutic of suspicion", the notion that any interpreter's approach to reading scripture is necessarily flawed. Although this position echoes as far back as Schleiermacher, Dark's contribution lies in his contextualizing this method in the 21st century.