Martin Marty
Although now retired from the University of Chicago's Divinity School, where he taught in the area of American religious history since 1963, Martin Marty continues to be active in the field. Quite apart from his role in training new generations of American religionists and his many publications, Marty has a national U.S. presence through his many media appearances as an interpreter of issues that fall broadly within the area of contemporary US religion and politics. He is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church and is the past president of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History, and the American Catholic Historical Association. He has served on US Presidential commissions and has received many honorary doctoral degrees--all indications of the influential role his work has played in the late-twentieth century US academy. Along with R. Scott Appleby, Marty co-directed The Fundamentalism Project--a multi-year, collaborative research project under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 1998 the University of Chicago's Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion was renamed The Martin Marty Center (currently under the directorship of Wendy Doniger)--to which Marty regularly writes a web column for its feature, "Sightings."
Major Works
Pilgrims in Their Own Land : 500 Years of Religion in America
(1984)
Modern American Religion (1986, 1991, 1996; 3 vols.)
Fundamentalisms Observed (1991; co-edited with Scott Appleby)
Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance
(1993; CO-edited with Scott Appleby)
Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and
Education (1993; CO-edited with Scott Appleby)
Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements
(1994; CO-edited with Scott Appleby)
Fundamentalisms Comprehended (1995; CO-edited with Scott Appleby)
The One and the Many: America's Search for the Common Good (1998)
Politics, Religion, and the Common Good: Advancing a Distinctly American
Conversation About Religion's Role in Our Shared Life (2000)
Martin Luther: A Life (2004)
When Faiths Collide (2005)
Quotation
"I do believe ... that the way to sort out the trivial from the urgent
and the appropriate from the irrelevant is getting a variety of people
together and starting a conversation. That's a technique suggested by
a civil rights leader in Chicago more than three decades ago: 'We just
get a roomful of people,' he explained, 'and tell them not to come out
until they have a solution.' 'To what problem?' 'You'll find out quickly
enough if you only start talking.' So start talking."
- from Martin Marty, Politics, Religion, and the Common Good (2000)
Select Web Resources on Marty
Information
on Martin Marty's Career
University
of Chicago's Martin Marty Center
"The
Sin of Pride: Martin Marty on George W. Bush"
University
of Chicago faculty web page for Martin Marty
National
Public Radio (NPR) interview with Martin Marty, on his recent book on
martin Luther (February 24, 2004; requires RealPlayer)
National
Public Radio (NPR) interview, from Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, with
Martin Marty (May 3, 2002)