The Big Read: an Evening with Dr. David Dark

Thursday, November 8 at 7 P.M. in Mulder Chapel

Join us for Dr. David Dark’s lecture “What Passes for Life?” during the NEA Big Read this November. This year’s Big Read book is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. The novel takes place in the Great Lakes region after a fictional swine flu pandemic, known as the “Georgia Flu”, has devastated the world, killing most of the population. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015.

Religious question are political questions are post-apocalyptic questions. Dr. David Dark, assistant professor of Religion and the Arts in the College of Theology at Belmont University and author of Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious, will explore how good post-apocalyptic novels break the ice of the status quo by inviting us to do battle with our own moral carelessness. He will discuss how Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven encourages us to take the temperature of our own strange behavior. What have we normalized and why? If we let it, Station Eleven makes us more alive to the arbitrariness of organizing our own fictions and leads us to proceed more wonderingly in our conception of ourselves and others.