Soon after becoming bishop in 1996, Marshall decided to write a monthly column and offer it to local newspapers "to provide a polite but direct alternative to an extraordinarily conservative religious and political culture...to offer good news particularly to those who cannot identify with or who have begun to question that culture, in either its protestant or Roman Catholic manifestations," according to a news release from the diocese.

Since that time, daily and weekly newspapers in his 14-county Episcopal diocese in eastern and northeastern Pennsylvania have published some 130 of his monthly columns.

The column is almost always different from another column he writes for Diocesan Life, the monthly newspaper of the Diocese of Bethlehem, the release said.

"Given that most of the ink in the space allotted to religious columns in area newspapers is taken up by the dominant religious culture," he writes in the preface of the book, "I have from the first spent most of my time each month attempting to reach those who think Christianity is irrelevant or anti-intellectual, and those who have been burned by rigorist religion."

'Messages' is a compilation of more than 90 of Marshall's columns, organized along thematic lines. Marshall addresses all aspects of life, from the intimate and complex relationships of couples and families to thorny social and religious issues, the release said.

"Because life is complex and everybody's acts are determined by multiple motives and impulses," he writes about The Sopranos, "almost all of our judgments about other people's souls must be held in abeyance, even though we can and must have boundaries about their behavior…To have the questions put so strongly in the guise of powerful entertainment may not be a bad thing a all."

In "Learning From What Jesus Did Not Do," he writes that Jesus "did not give in to his disciples' desire to have more power than others, did not force anyone to believe in him, did not condemn those who were pushed to the edges of life…The ministry of not condemning was one of the most radical things Jesus did."

Before coming to Bethlehem, Marshall had been a professor at Yale Divinity School and director of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He has written extensively both for scholars and clergy and for the general reader.

More information about the book is available here.