About the Author

The following remarks were discovered tucked inside a used copy of Whitehead’s Process and Reality purchased for seventy-five cents at a church rummage sale, somewhere near the “Filosophy” section.

Rev. Dave Moorman does not write theology the way respectable institutions prefer theology to be written. There are no marble hallways here. No Latin footnotes marching in tidy formation toward tenure. No sense that the reader ought to straighten his tie before entering the room.

Instead, Moorman practices what might be called “tractor-seat philosophy” – ideas durable enough to survive dust, grief, boredom, weak coffee, and Midwestern winters.

He writes like a man who has read difficult books but never entirely trusted people who quote them too elegantly.

In Moorman’s world, metaphysics arrives through Fotomat envelopes, supermarket parking lots, awkward church suppers, old dogs dying, Alan Sherman records, hospital waiting rooms, and the unbearable mystery of ordinary consciousness. One suspects that if Socrates had been born in rural Kansas, he might have sounded something like this – assuming Socrates also knew how to reset a malfunctioning thermostat in the fellowship hall.

The remarkable thing is not that Moorman simplifies profound ideas. He doesn’t. He smuggles them.

Somewhere between the humor and the storytelling, readers suddenly realize they are contemplating identity, awareness, ego, mortality, forgiveness, myth, meaning, and the strange possibility that holiness may have more to do with presence than purity.

Like Mark Twain, Moorman understands that humor is often the only honest response to the spectacle of human certainty. And like Rod Serling, he knows that the ordinary American living room is already one thin curtain away from metaphysical bewilderment.

His prose carries the peculiar authority of someone who is not trying very hard to sound authoritative.

That may be why it works.

Moorman belongs to an older and less celebrated tradition: the public thinker disguised as a local pastor. The sort of person who spends decades tossing difficult ideas into ordinary conversation, hoping a few might lodge in the soul of someone driving a combine or stirring soup after midnight.

He calls this “retail theology.”

The phrase undersells the achievement.

What he is really attempting is the redistribution of wonder.

— Marion Finsterwald