Farley W. Snell

Farley W. Snell died on May 22, 2025, in Asheville, NC. He was 91 years old.

Farley was a fourth generation Floridian born in Eau Gallie, FL, a quaint little town on the Indian River that was later absorbed into Melbourne and where he delivered papers for five years. As a youngster he lived in the world of comic books and was a member of the Captain Marvel Club. Since 1946, he had been a loyal St. Louis Cardinals fan. He attended Melbourne High School, which he ran with the help of the principal. He graduated from Florida Southern College with a A.B. (not a B.A.) and earned an M.Div. and Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Politically, Farley was a yellow dog Democrat, pure and simple. The first time he voted, he voted for Adlai Stevenson, then again, and never wavered. He actually thought the Party and what it stood for was always more important than any candidate. He had a good mind and a set of accumulated abilities, and he was fortunate to end up in a series of places where that combination worked in his favor and fed his ego needs (which were considerable).

He was a United Methodist minister, and the pastor of one church, which somehow managed to survive the experience. He served as campus minister and Director of the Wesley Foundations at the University of Miami in Coral Gables and Indiana University (not the University of Indiana) in Bloomington. It was the Sixties, and he used his doctorate in historical theology to help women get to New York for abortions (New York being the only state on the continent that allowed them at the time), anonymously to contact the parents of runaways to assure them that their children were safe, and to join other campus ministers in monitoring crowds at anti-war rallies (at one of which he watched as the old library at IU burned). That sort of thing.

He was university chaplain and later professor and chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX for twenty-seven years. The University historian had this to say about that, “He was more of a chapel preacher and teacher than a standard chaplain. A person of independent mind who refused to be forced to do what he did not believe in, he was a splendid preacher, always preaching from the lectionary”. At the time of his retirement, the University published a book of his sermons entitled “Sometimes a Surprising Word”. Good preacher, not much of a chaplain, and stubborn.

Farley taught an adult, mostly retired, Sunday School class called the Pathfinders at First United Methodist Church in Georgetown. When he stopped, their tribute read, “A dedicated teacher, who challenged us to think, taught us to disagree amicably, and entertained while edifying for twenty-eight years”.

After retirement from Southwestern University, he served on the Georgetown City Council for six years, where he was very productive, being most proud of having helped craft and get adopted ordinances that forbade smoking in publicly frequented businesses and that helped protect the city’s heritage trees. While still in Georgetown and then at OLLI in Asheville, he continued to teach courses in the history of religious thought in colleges for seniors.

Farley was married to Ann for sixty-seven years until she died in 2023. They shared the same values and political leanings. They enjoyed the same things, threw great parties, and liked talking with one another. It was not always smooth sailing, and it was not always certain that they would stay together. But they did, and they did some good. Together they nurtured two marvelously bright and independent human beings, their daughter, Myra, and son, Clarke.

Farley is survived by Myra and her husband John McDonald; Clarke and his partner Nancy Romano; his sister, Susan McCartney and her husband Dan; and a sprinkling of friends.