In the acknowledgments at the beginning of his book The Gospel According To America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea, David Dark thanks a group of friends “for exemplifying the kind of conversation that makes disagreement a breakthrough rather than an awkward ending.” A couple pages later, in the chapter before Chapter 1, Instead of an Introduction, David writes, “Without a costly commitment to candor among family and potential friends, the possibility of truthful conversation (a pre-requisite for the formation of more perfect unions) begins to tragically diminish, and responsible speech that communicates what we’re actually thinking and believing becomes a lost art.”