about

Dale Mundt is a 24 year old husband, father, veteran, and grilled cheese artist. He loves life, depression, and burritos. He aspires to finish college, hitchhike to South America, and teach Jaeda the “Thriller” dance.

He is currently living in or around Madison, WI, posing as an English/Philosophy double major at UW. He loves watching Arrested Development with his wife and the free play of signifiers. He listens to the Beatles when he is thinking, Feist when he is happy, Okkervil River when he is loving friends, and early 90’s hardcore gangster rap when he is grocery shopping.

He grew up in a magical realm called ‘Fundamentalia’. In this magical kingdom, God wanted you to grow up intellectually and emotionally stunted while you grew more and more convinced of your superiority. Hopefully, you would learn to focus your superiority on people who didn’t live in ‘Fundamentalia’. This allowed you to ignore all of the things in your life that didn’t add up. If that wasn’t enough, there was always Bible college, a four year institution dedicated to fostering your infantile emotional state, destroying the seeds of critical thinking, brainwashing you with medieval gender roles, and building a sense of superiority so powerful it would stay with you until your children enrolled in the bible college.

But, by some happy accident, Dale escaped with absolutely no bitterness or residual issues that he is now being forced to deal with.


  1. Mel 10.24.08 / 7pm
    1

    Whether intentionally or not (mmm, we’re going with not) pretty sure I’ve learned more critical thinking at my current insitution of higher learning than I would have almost anywhere else. More than one road leads to intelligence.

    Said critical thinking leads me to point out you are blaming God for the perverted actions of His creatures . . . sure plenty of people want me to be intellectually and emotionally stunted (I am not allowed to be superior, or at least I am only an inferior superior, since I am female), but I think God enjoys it when I prove them wrong.

    Not that they always realize they are being proven wrong . . .

  2. dale 10.29.08 / 3am
    2

    I agree that there is more than one path to intelligence. Most of my closest friends are Bible college grads, and I have had this discussion at least once with most of them. I’m not discounting the value of learning through (and despite) the bubble, but I’m not shy about criticizing the problems I see, either.

    I do have to point out, however, that a critical reading of the fundamentalist paragraph would find the most probable reading of that paragraph to be a tongue-in-cheek reductio ad absurdum of fundamentalism, not a literal belief that God purposely tries to ruin people’s lives.

    [sarcasm] I’m surprised, since differentiating between literal and non-literal passages is such a strong point of fundamentalism… [/sarcasm]

  3. Brian 06.05.09 / 9pm
    3

    Post more. I can’t get enough of your writing. This stuff is good. I appreciate your “about me” section. Couldn’t have put the way we were raised any better than that.

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