Martin E. 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.

Life and career

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. 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. 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. and was the Mohandas M. K. Gandhi Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

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; 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.