David Keck

Reverend David Keck is the kind of person people bring their big questions to. As chaplain at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, that is much of his day, sitting with students, faculty, and staff as they work through faith, doubt, and the things that have no easy answers. He is a Harvard-trained historian with a few books behind him, though you would not know it from him. What people tend to notice first is how easy he is to talk to.

He came to this work the long way around. He started out as a historian, at home in the medieval and Reformation world, until the questions he was studying stopped feeling like history and started feeling like life. He wanted to be near the people living them, so he went to divinity school, was ordained a Presbyterian minister, and spent years as a pastor and campus chaplain before he came to Embry-Riddle. It suits him. He spends his days now among pilots and engineers, and, true to form, that has become his next thing to study: where faith and flight meet.

That curiosity has taken him to some unusual places. Over the years he has looked into a leprosarium in the Philippines, the ethics of video games, what sports can teach us about justice, and how a congregation holds itself together. For all the range, it keeps coming back to the same thing: people, and especially people who are struggling. He wrote a book about Alzheimer's and the love of God, about being held by God even when you can no longer remember whose you are, and he gives his time to the Chalice of Repose Project, which brings music to people who are dying. The ideas were never really the point. The people were.

There is more to David than the work, of course. He is a husband and a father of two who plays the harp and follows his football. And he holds onto one verse more than any other, the one he calls his life verse: "Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep." Spend a little time around him and you start to see that it is less a favorite passage than a description of how he lives.