Introduction
To explain how it all started, I must tell you about Edith Bennett (1931-2013). For more than fifty years, she hosted a Sunday morning radio program that eventually became the longest running such endeavor in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. It was carried on WOMI-FM in Owensboro, Kentucky. In 1991, I became her pastor at Third Baptist Church, where she was both a member and an employee. She invited me to contribute a “devotional” for use each week on her program, and I did … in a manner of speaking, because what I actually prepared were five-minute recordings that I came to call “commentary on religion and American life.” At least that is the subtitle I gave to my own radio program when, in 1998, I launched The Meetinghouse on the campus radio station of Georgetown College, where I was serving as dean of the chapel and professor of religion. These written and recorded commentaries I distributed to newspapers across the Commonwealth and not a few were printed for the general public.
I suspended the weekly radio program in 2000 after interviewing the host of NPR’s “Sound and Spirit.” Her name was and is Ellen Kushner, then of Boston and now of New York. She came to Lexington to speak at Temple Adath Israel and kindly consented to an interview (which I conducted in the downtown studios of Jim Host). After the recording stopped, I asked her, “How many people help you with your program on WGBH?” Five, she said, and I asked, “What else do they do?” and she said, That’s all. I knew right then I was foolish to think my on-the-margin-of-my-regular-job efforts to produce a show, even with the excellent help of my colleague Lee Huckleberry, could measure up to the standards I had set for myself and my show. I suspended my Meetinghouse radio program and stuck to writing, launching a weekly email newsletter. In 2006, I collected 119 of those columns and published them, with the help of both Mercer University Press and also my good friend and benefactor John Williams. On the Other Side of Oddville, was the title also of one of the columns, written about my six-week preaching gig at the Beaver Baptist Church in Harrison County, Kentucky.
After my stint at Georgetown College and a decade launching and leading the Academy of Preachers, I “retired” and moved to St. Simons Island, Georga and promptly launched both a radio program (the same week Ahmaud Arbery was murdered just off the next exit of Interstate 95, not ten miles away, as John Prine would sing in “Mexican Home”) and my weekly newsletter. Which means that between 2018 and 2026, I have written at least 400 columns, most about 700 words; and from that supply, I have chosen 104 for this second volume. This was not an easy task and trying to organize and title this book drove me crazy, especially after my daughter-in-law Maryanna read the whole thing and sent it back to me with more red ink than any document I have ever written. She was right about everything, of course, and I have tried to honor her editorial guidance.
Which I have, mostly, but not necessarily in the way she envisioned. But thanks to her, of course, and also to my wonderful wife Jan, who pushed me to embrace that phrase from another John Prine song, “Everybody”—Eating That Gospel Pie—for the title. That freed me to present these columns as representing how I survived what has been, by one measure, a horrible, no good, very bad stretch—and there, I am quoting somebody but I am not sure who—by which I mean that in my personal life and in our public life, things have been hard, especially the year 2020, when COVID hit, and Congress was assailed, and the MAGA movement gathered steam, and our family endured multiple challenges to life and love.
Through it all, I kept writing, and one irregular reader was my old friend Robert Mong who retired in 2024 from the presidency of the University of North Texas at Dallas. Before that, he had a 40-year career in journalism, including as publisher of the Dallas Morning News and before that the Owensboro Messenger Inquirer. When he came to Owensboro during my pastoral tenure there, I took him to lunch and also to the now-missing croquet court at The Pearl Club on Summit Drive but was originally the Summitt Golf Club. I taught him the basics of competitive English six-wicket croquet, which I suspect he never played and which I now I no longer play, but could because I have been carrying around both my Jaques mallet from London and the home-made mallets presented to me when I left my pastorate in Ripley County, Indiana, so many years ago. There is a story in all of this, but maybe that will make it into book three, but here in book two, Bob writes the Preface like he did for book one, and I thank him for that.
Enough said about all of this. It is time to read these stories, and I do hope that one or more will inspire you to survive something in your life journey that is hard and unexpected and capable of bringing you down from where you want to be. Keep on reading books, pushing back, making music and the other seven life disciplines I write about, including that last one, following Jesus … one day at a time (to quote yet another song I first heard at Hopewell Baptist Church in that same county in Indiana where I first learned to play croquet and preach and write. Maybe).
Even I know it is low class to end a paragraph with the word “maybe” and a closing parenthesis, but there it is. Cheers!
Dwight A. Moody
Easter 2026
Note: Almost all of these essays are 700+ word commentaries I wrote and published in my weekly newsletter and can be found archived on the website: themeetinghouse.net. One exception is “The Transphobic Epidemic,” which is an email interview. Other exceptions are longer and are published here for the first time; these include “Soundtrack of My Life,” “Some John Prine6 Songs,” and the longer essay from which the book title is taken, “Eating that Gospel Pie” (which was prepared for the Christian Scholars Conference in 2024).
