Pastor will perform St. Mark's reading from memory on March 10

On Friday, March 10, in Goodrich Hall at Williams College (7:30 p.m.), the Rev. Bert Marshall will perform entirely from memory the whole of St. Mark's Gospel -- as it may have been told in the early years of the Jesus Movement, before the rise of institutional Christianity. Marshall is a native of Weeping Water, Nebraska. He has played in a Lincoln-based rock-n-roll band, spent 10 years driving tractor-trailers for a New England health food distributor, apprenticed on a couple of Vermont dairy farms, co-managed with his wife a small farm and country inn in northern Vermont, and worked with troubled teenagers from New York City at a residential setting in Pleasantville, N.Y. He is a graduate of Yale University Divinity School, where upon graduation he was awarded the top prizes in "religion and the arts" and in "the public recitation of scripture." He's also the pastor of the First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, in Lee, Mass. He committed the Gospel of Mark to memory while on a three-month sabbatical in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2003. You can read his thoughts about his spoken-word one-man show here:
http://www.gospelofmarkalive.com/story.html His reading is co-presented with the Williams College Chaplains' office and the Inkberry literary workshop in North Adams.