David Dark

Biography

I teach—or try to—because I'm drawn to the enlivening event of open-ended conversation. I have a deep, occasionally beleaguered but abiding faith in its possibilities, and my passion for intellectual exchange is, in some sense, derived from my memory of people creating or conjuring this kind of space for me inside and outside the classroom. These memories of direct communication, affectionate, conversational proddings, and kindly proffered reading recommendations, take me back to all the times I realized I was being invited into brave new worlds. I know myself to be the recipient of myriad acts of intellectual hospitality, and I hope to live up to them somehow. I'm especially pleased to attempt this work in the School of Religion, because the question of religion, the way we order our lives and imagine ourselves and the world we're in, is one of the biggest and most broad-ranging questions I can think of. It's a subject which, to my mind, contains all subjects.