Storytellers

David Toole has spent most of his life in his home state of Montana but is currently living in exile in Durham, where he is a professor of theology, ethics, and global health at Duke University. He earned graduate degrees from Duke in the early 1990s but then returned to Montana, where he tried his hand at almost anything that would keep him employed. Before coming back to Duke in 2005, he was managing a construction company in a small rural community, where he and his wife, Nancy, lived with their three boys—and with their chickens, pigs, horses, dogs, cats, and sheep. The boys are now scattered around the world, but David and Nancy keep a truck in Montana, knowing that the end of exile is likely to come as a surprise, and wanting to be ready to return.