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Edward Sorin Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons by David Dark Brazos Press, 2002 160 pp.; $13.95, paper

David Dark's Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons is not only a model for enjoyment and discernment of the most thoughtful popular culture (which turns out not to be an oxymoron, after all). It is also an inspiring call to live in the world with what Walter Brueggemann would call "exilic consciousness"—the realization that we're exiled in a culture whose worldview we must not tolerate, even as we must coexist with it. So numbed are we by our social norms and institutions, Dark writes, that we forget we are living in a pseudo-world, one "founded upon the reduction of nature, creativity, and human life itself to whatever will benefit and perpetuate 'market forces.'"

Dark invokes The Truman Show, whose creepy sovereign, executive producer Christof, says, "We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented." Truly, we need the apocalyptic genre to awaken us to "question the reigning takes on reality." We usually interpret "apocalypse" as suggesting dramatic destruction, Dark says, but the word actually means revelation and epiphany. Apocalyptic art "testifies concerning a world both beyond and presently among the world of appearances."

Such testimony can be found in wildly diverse sources: Flannery O'Connor, The Simpsons, the music of Radiohead, the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, makers of Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Dark's commentary on these and others satisfies the reader with both the knowledgeable command of the English teacher he is at Christ Presbyterian Academy in Nashville and the contagious pleasure of a lover of illuminating storytelling. To pull this off requires a rejection of the most familiar religious impulse toward popular culture, which Dark identifies as a pious condescension. "It's as if such religious faith has no greater calling than counting bad words, spotting the sexual innuendo, and walking away in a loud, well-publicized huff."

Dark hints at the dark irony in this professed fear of popular culture: all too often, even as they are protesting against the latest outrage—a dung-smeared painting of the Virgin Mary!—Christians uncritically accept the generic values of mainstream culture, while supposedly godless artists are genuinely sounding the alarm. He would agree with William Romanowski, who writes in Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture that North American Christians "tend to privatize their faith, confining religion to family and local congregations, while conducting their affairs in business, politics, education, social life, and the arts much like everyone else."

Dark points out that although Christians are to be culturally subversive, "a political-economic order has nothing to fear from a sentimental, fully 'spiritualized' faith." He sees the stubborn rebels in The Matrix as a metaphor for our mission: "[The world] is under siege. But there is a resistance movement. … This mobile, beleaguered city functions in the world, seeking to free creation from its momentary bondage to decay." How odd, Dark notes, that at a time "when the self-proclaimed representatives of 'the gospel' have reduced the good news to 'how to get to heaven when you die,' it's profoundly ironic that a science fiction action film would serve to bring the reality-altering significance of the Jewish and Christian revelations up on the cultural radar."

Taken that far, Dark's book is a welcome wake-up call. But what Dark does not resolve is just how far to carry this cry. How fine a line is there between "alternative consciousness" and dysfunctional cynicism? We must live, he writes, with a fundamental discomfort with "the way things are," which "the powers that be" have, in Orwellian fashion, trained us to consider synonymous with "the way things ought to be" and "the only way things could have gone." But is there not an appropriate level of acceptance of our cultural norms, and is this not necessary for fruitful cultural engagement—to work, as Jeremiah calls us, for the shalom of the city in which we find ourselves exiled? Dark's analysis almost leaves you with the feeling that if you have any fondness whatsoever for capitalism, you've sold out to the dark side. Meanwhile, as he ruefully acknowledges, the "alternative rock" of Radiohead makes millions for a huge corporation.

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