So Be Free: Pastoral Discourses on Freedom (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798889250203)

About the Book

What is freedom? Does it exist or are our lives totally determined? Do other species of animals have freedom of a somewhat less extended form than humans? Can we lose our freedom? Can we be enslaved in a bondage of will? If so, can we be released from these bondages? How was Jesus an example of freedom and of a path to our liberation?

So Be Free is a series of 24 essays that seeks to remind us, refresh us, and inform us on how our essential freedom comes to us as part of our consciousness of the Profound Reality we face. These essays use both secular and Christian vocabulary to express this Reality. Gene Wesley Marshall seeks to share a human reality that can be expressed with other religious vocabularies as well as with Christian and secular vocabularies. This book is something more than opinion or theology. These sermon-like essays are provocations for each of us to look within our own lives and see what we find there.

About the Author

Gene Wesley Marshall began his education at Oklahoma State University as a mathematician and physicist. In 1953, he decided to leave a mathematics career and attend seminary at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas. He served as a local church pastor, a chaplain in the army, and in 1962, joined a religious order of families (the Order: Ecumenical). For six years, he served as dean of the Ecumenical Institute's eight-week residential "Academy" that trained leadership for religious and social engagement for participants from many parts of the world.

In the early 1960s, Marshall was an active participant in the civil rights revolution, serving for one year as the Protestant executive of the National Conference on Religion and Race. As a faculty member of the Ecumenical Institute, he also traveled the United States, Latin America, Europe, India, Hong Kong, and Australia as a teacher and lecturer of religious and social ethics topics. These trips included an in-depth study of world cultures and a view of the social conditions of the world's peoples. In the mid 1980s, he was one of the organizers of the bioregional movement.

Beginning in 1983, Gene and Joyce Marshall organized a nonprofit educational organization, "Realistic Living," and began co-teaching innovative programs and workshops plus publishing journals, books, and essays. This book is Gene's tenth book-length project, including The Thinking Christian, Radical Gifts, and From Empire to Eco-Democracy. Joyce and Gene live in Bonham, Texas in a straw-bale house.