About the author

Kerry Ingram was born and raised in Littleton, Colorado, and has spent his life paying close attention — first as an engineer, working at the intersection of computing and industry from the earliest days of personal computers through a career in IT security, and as a husband, father, and grandfather of six watching something quieter erode: the shared trust that once held communities together. A man of deep and active faith, Kerry hikes, builds, and photographs the Colorado mountains he calls home — including the cover image of this book, his own. Morality Lost is his first book, and an honest invitation to begin again.

Why I wrote this

My father never gave a speech about morality. He just lived it — and it transferred. To me, then through me to my kids, and now to my grandchildren. That's the thing the book itself names: character isn't taught. It's caught. It worked for me because I happened to be standing close enough to a man like that, for long enough.

But fewer people have that anymore. The sheriff's gone. The soda fountain's gone. The generation in the middle is unmoored, and the thing that used to pass quietly, by proximity, isn't reaching people the way it reached me.

So this book — the guides, the speaking, all of it — is my attempt to do on purpose, at a distance, in writing, what my father did without trying, just by standing next to me — and what someone else's grandmother, or coach, or neighbor did for them, without either of us ever calling it a lesson. I can't be in the room with everyone the way he was in the room with me. So I built a version of that room that can reach past my own front door — something a stranger can pick up, be changed the way people are changed by proximity to someone steady, and pass along to someone else in turn.

I'm not trying to start a movement. My father wasn't a movement — he was one man who decided how he was going to live. I'm just trying to be, for people I'll never meet, what he was for me, and what someone just as steady has been for someone else. And to get there before I run out of time to finish it.