The practice of Christianity is going through a transition that is deeper than the Reformation. The Thinking Christian explores two main questions: (1) What is “religion” as a general social process that can link humans to Profound Reality, and (2) what is a meaningful and appropriate mode of Christian theologizing, communal life, and mission to this planet for a viable and vital next Christian practice?

These are profound probes, and they are communal and activist guidelines for general readers. Such union of the profound and the practical pertains to the needs of scholars as well.

Gene W. Marshall began his education 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 has served as a local church pastor, a chaplain in the army, and in 1962 joined a religious order of families (the Order: Ecumenical), and travelled the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, India, Hong Kong, and Australia teaching and lecturing on religious and social ethics topics. These trips included an in depth study of world cultures and a vivid sense of the social conditions of the world’s peoples. He 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. For six years he served as dean of an eight-week residential academy that trained leadership personnel for religious and social engagement work throughout the world. In 1984, he and his wife, Joyce Marshall, organized a nonprofit educational organization, Realistic Living, and began publishing journals, books, and essays. The couple were also organizers of bioregionalism – a geographically sensitive form of ecological realism, radical feminism, and interreligious sensibilities.