Martin E. Marty
Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity in the Divinity School; also in the Committee on the History of Culture
Ph.D. (University of Chicago)
Martin Marty has taught in the Divinity School, the Department of History, and the Committee on the History of Culture since 1963. He specializes in late eighteenthand twentieth-century American religion and occasionally holds seminars on subjects related to this specialty. An ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Professor Marty has put considerable effort into the Master of Divinity program at the Divinity School and into teaching for public ministry. In the spring quarter of 2006 he co-led (with W. Clark Gilpin) the Brauer Seminar on violence in American religious history. Marty talked with Bill Moyers about his recent book The Mystery of the Child. See and hear the video and read a transcript of the show at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08172007/watch2.html. 
Martin Marty's life-in-retirement has grown sufficiently complex that, with the help of Micah Marty and Ann Rehfeldt, he has tried to turn more efficient by resorting to a Web site. Hosts for his lectures, planners of programs, consultants, and researchers, can find answers to frequently asked questions answered there. It is www.illuminos.com . The first name to come up will be "Martin E. Marty." Click on it and the door opens to many links. The Micah Marty and Ann Rehfeldt lines on the home page will soon be detailed.
Current Activities:
Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught for 35 years and where the Martin Marty Center has since been founded to promote “public religion” endeavors. He writes the “M.E.M.O” column for the biweekly Christian Century, on whose staff he has served since 1956. He is also the editor of the fortnightly Context, since 1969, and authors the Marty Center’s weekly e-mail column, Sightings.
Books:
The author of over fifty books, Marty has written the three-volume Modern American Religion (University of Chicago Press). Other books are The One and the Many: America’s Search for the Common Good; Education, Religion and the Common Good and Politics, Religion and the Common Good, and with photographer Micah Marty, Places Along the Way; Our Hope for Years to Come; The Promise of Winter; and When True Simplicity Is Gained. His Righteous Empire won the National Book Award.
Presidencies and directorships:
Marty is past president of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History, and the American Catholic Historical Association. He has served on two U.S. 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. He has served St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, since 1988 as Regent, Board Chair, Interim President in late 2000, and is now Senior Regent. He was the founding President of the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics and is now the George B. Caldwell Senior Scholar in Residence there.
Honors:
Marty’s honors include the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, 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 the Order of Lincoln Medallion (Illinois’ top honor). He is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and of the Society of American Historians, an elected fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and—a native of that state—is an admiral in the Nebraska Navy. Marty has received 72 honorary doctorates.
Vita:
Born in West Point, Nebraska on February 5, 1928, Marty was ordained into the ministry in 1952 and served for a decade as a Lutheran parish pastor before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1963. “Marty” and his wife Harriet, a musician, live in Riverside, Illinois, and enjoy an extended family of seven children, including two who joined the family as foster children, nine grandchildren, and one great grandchild.
For further background, see Who’s Who in America, Contemporary Authors, and similar guides.
