Martin Marty

Martin Emil Marty (February 5, 1928 – February 25, 2025) was an American Lutheran religious scholar who wrote extensively on religion in the United States.

Biography

Early life

Marty was born on February 5, 1928, in West Point, Nebraska, to Emil, a parochial school teacher and organist, and Anne Louise (Wuerdemann) Marty. Raised in Iowa and Nebraska, he was a member of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and was educated a Lutheran preparatory school, then at Concordia College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Concordia Seminary of St. Louis, Missouri. Marty completed masters level work at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago through 1954, and received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Chicago in 1956. He served as a Lutheran pastor from 1952 to 1967 in the suburbs of Chicago.

Career

In 1958, Marty planted The Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. Though Marty became a founding influence in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Holy Spirit was planted within the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod and remains a member church of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod.

In 1962, ''Life'' magazine included Marty among "One Hundred of the Most Important Young Men and Women in the United States” in a special issue focused on what they termed "The Take-Over Generation." Marty was cited as “a penetrating, outspoken critic of suburban church life in America,” who served as associate editor of ''The Christian Century'' and led "the fastest growing Lutheran parish in the country.”

From 1963 to 1998, Marty taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, eventually holding an endowed chair, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professorship. His more than 130 doctoral advisees at the University of Chicago included M. Craig Barnes, Jonathan M. Butler, Vincent Harding, Jeffrey Kaplan, James R. Lewis, and John G. Stackhouse Jr.

Marty served as president of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History, and the American Catholic Historical Association. He was the founding president and later the George B. Caldwell Scholar-in-Residence at the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics. He served on two US presidential commissions and was director of both the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Public Religion Project at the University of Chicago sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts. He served at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, from 1988 as Regent, Board Chair, Interim President in late 2000, and since 2002 as Senior Regent.

Marty retired on his seventieth birthday. He held emeritus status at the University of Chicago; he served as Robert W. Woodruff Visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University 2003–2004. His first wife, Elsa L. Schumacher died in 1981, and in 1982, he married Harriet J. Meyer. He had seven children (including two foster children), among whom are John Marty, a Minnesota State Senator, and Peter Marty, who hosted the ELCA radio ministry ''Grace Matters'' from 2005 to 2009 and is now publisher of '' The Christian Century'' magazine and senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa.

Marty died on February 25, 2025, at the age of 97.

Awards, accolades, and honors

Marty received numerous honors, including the National Humanities Medal, the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the University of Chicago Alumni Medal, the Distinguished Service Medal of the Association of Theological Schools, and 80 honorary doctorates. In 1991, Marty was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (LHD) degree from Whittier College. The Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion is named for Marty and has been awarded annually since 1996.

Named in his honor on his 70th birthday in 1979, the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion is the University of Chicago Divinity School's institute for interdisciplinary research in all fields of the academic study of religion. He was an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and of the American Philosophical Society and was the Mohandas M. K. Gandhi Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.

Marty was inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the State's highest honor) by the Governor of Illinois in 1998 in the field of Religion.

Works

Overview

Marty published an authored book and an edited book for every year he was a full-time professor. He maintained that authorial pace for the first decade of his retirement, slowing only in the second. His dozens of published books include ''Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America'' (1970), for which he won the National Book Award in category Philosophy and Religion;"National Book Awards – 1972"
National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 8, 2012. the encyclopedic five-volume '' Fundamentalism Project'', co-edited with historian R. Scott Appleby, formerly his dissertation advisee; and the biography ''Martin Luther'' (2004). He was a columnist for '' The Christian Century'' magazine, contributing a column in every issue for 36 years (1972-2008), and served as its associate editor for fifty years, beginning in 1956. He also edited the biweekly ''Context'' newsletter from 1969 until 2010, and wrote a weekly column distributed electronically as
Sightings
by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. In addition, he has authored over 5,000 articles and many more incidental pieces, encyclopedia entries, forewords, and the like.

Bibliography

Author

*
The New Shape of American Religion
' (1958) New York: Harper and Brothers
*''A Short History of Christianity'', The World Publishing Company, Cleveland, Ohio (1959)
*''Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America'' (1970), Harper Torchbook 1977 paperback: , Charles Scribner's Sons & Collier Macmillan Pub
1986 rev. ed.

*''Protestantism'' (1972) Garden City, New York: Image Books.
*''The Public Church: Mainline-Evangelical-Catholic'' (1981) New York: Crossroads.
*''A Cry of Absence, Reflections for the Winter of the Heart,'' (1983) Harper & Row,
*''Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America'' (1984) New York: Penguin.
*''Modern American Religion''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Volume 1: The Irony of It All, 1893–1919
(1986)
**Volume 2: The Noise of Conflict, 1919–1941 (1990)
**Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960 (1996)
*''Religion and Republic: The American Circumstance'' (1987) Boston: Beacon Press.
*''The Glory and the Power: The Fundamentalist Challenge to the Modern World''. (1992) Beacon. Boston, Massachusetts.
*''The One and the Many: America's Struggle for the Common Good'' (1997) Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
*''Martin Luther'' (The Penguin Lives Series). New York: Viking (2004)
*
*''Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers From Prison: A Biography'' (2011) Princeton University Press. Princeton, New Jersey.
*''October 31, 1517: Martin Luther and the Day that Changed the World'' (2016) Paraclete Press. Brewster, Massachusetts.

Book chapters

*Martin E. Marty. "Half a Life in Religious Studies: Confessions of an 'Historical Historian'." pp. 151–174 in ''The Craft of Religious Studies'', edited by Jon R. Stone. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.
* Martin E. Marty, "Locating Jay P. Dolan," in ''The American Catholic Experience: Essays in Honor of Jay P. Dolan'' (Catholic University of America Press, 2001), pp. 99–10
online

Articles and monographs

*Marty, Martin E. "Fundamentalism Reborn: Faith and Fanaticism." '' Saturday Review''. May 1980, 37–42.
*Marty, Martin E.
"Fundamentalism as a Social Phenomenon."
'' Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences'' 42 (November 1988): 15–29.
*Marty, Martin E
"Too Bad We're So Relevant: The Fundamentalism Project Projected"
''The Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences'' 49 (March 1996): 22–38.

Editor

*''The Place of Bonhoeffer: Problems and possibilities in his thought'' , Association Press, 1962.
*'' The Fundamentalism Project'', Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Series Editors
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**
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*''Hizmet Means Service: Perspectives on an Alternative Path Within Islam'', University of California Press (2015).

See also

* Franz Bibfeldt (fictitious theologian promoted by Marty)

References

External links

Martin E. Marty homepageSightings, a publication of the University of Chicago Divinity School's Martin Marty CenterVideo interview on his book, The Mystery of the Child

Download or listen to Martin Marty interview by The Progressive magazine
September 27, 2006
"Prison Writings in a World Come of Age: The Special Vision of Dietrich Bonhoeffer"
Martin E. Marty,
Berfrois
', May 12, 2011
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Marty, Martin E.
1928 births
2025 deaths
American historians of religion
20th-century American Lutheran clergy
American Lutheran theologians
University of Chicago Divinity School alumni
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Christians
National Book Award winners
National Humanities Medal recipients
People from West Point, Nebraska
Presidents of the American Academy of Religion
Presidents of the American Society of Church History
Public theologians
St. Olaf College people
University of Chicago faculty
Concordia Seminary alumni
Members of the American Philosophical Society