Latest news with #MartinE.Marty
CBS News
03-03-2025
- General
- CBS News
Martin Marty, renowned religious scholar and University of Chicago professor emeritus, dies at 97
University of Chicago professor emeritus the Rev. Dr. Martin E. Marty, once described by Time Magazine as "the most influential interpreter of religion in the U.S.," died last week. Marty died Tuesday, Feb. 25 at the Minneapolis care community where he had most recently lived. He was 97. Marty earned his Ph.D. from UChicago, and was on the faculty at the university's Divinity School for 35 years, UChicago noted. The U of C said Marty's understanding of Protestant Christianity and fundamentalism "still frame the view of modern American religion." The U of C added that historian L. Benjamin Rolsky called Marty "arguably the public intellectual of the 1980s," while biographer Grant Wacker suggested Marty belonged with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Billy Graham, and 18th-century revivalist and preacher Jonathan Edwards on the "Mount Rushmore of American religious history." A native of West Point, Nebraska, Marty attended Concordia Seminary and Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary before he earned his Ph.D. from the U of C Divinity School in 1956, the university said. Marty became the founding pastor of the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit in the northwest Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village in 1958, the U of C said. Marty joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1963, and wrote more than 450 books, and 5,000 articles, essays, and other documents in that role, the U of C noted. He was also editor of the newsletter Context, and served as an editor for The Christian Century magazine for 50 years. As a practicing pastor, Marty also marched for civil rights in Selma, Alabama, with Dr. King in 1965, and served as a Protestant observer during the Second Vatican Council the year before, the U of C noted. A published obituary noted that Marty also traveled extensively to deliver thousands of lectures, sermons, and commencement speeches. UChicago cited the six-year "Fundamentalism Project" — a scholarly effort that spanned from 1988 until 1994 — as one of Marty's "most significant Scholarly achievements." The project, which Marty directed with his onetime advisee R. Scott Appleby, examined the role of conservative religious movements in societies around the world, the U of C said. The result was five volumes of case studies and analysis that the U of C said "quickly became the standard works in comparative political religion." Marty was also the founding president and later the scholar-in-residence at the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics. The published obituary said Marty may be known best for the study of "public theology," a phrase Marty himself coined "to describe the critical engagement of religious and cultural issues that can foster the common good." "His rich interest in pluralism allowed him to be conversant in different genres and among diverse audiences," Marty's obit read. Marty retired from the Divinity School faculty on his 70th birthday in 1998. Marty married Elsa E. Schumacher in 1952, and they had four sons along with two permanent foster children, his obit read. After Elsa died of cancer in 1981, Marty reconnected with Harriet Meyer, the widow of a seminary classmate, and married her in 1982, his obit noted. Marty's son, Peter W. Marty, is now editor and publisher of The Christian Century and also served as a Lutheran pastor. The junior Marty wrote about his father in the magazine last week. "He encouraged those he met to love God from the top of their head and the bottom of their heart. Grace gave him the conviction that nobody was beneath him, just as the music of Bach reminded him that angels hovered just above him," Peter Marty wrote of his father. "In between was his own confident place in the lap of God. Forever grounded in the life of the church and anchored in hope, he took the happy simplicity of his childhood on the Nebraska prairie as his road map for life." A memorial service will be held at Central Lutheran Church in Minneapolis on Saturday, March 29, and will be live-streamed via the church's website. The U of C said a campus memorial service for Marty will be held at a later time.
New York Times
02-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Martin E. Marty, Influential Religious Historian, Dies at 97
Martin E. Marty, a pre-eminent religious historian, prolific author, dependable exponent of mainstream Protestantism and staunch champion of pluralism, died on Tuesday in Minneapolis. He was 97. His death at a retirement home, where he had lived since 2022, was confirmed by his son Peter. In more than 60 books, thousands of articles and as what he described as a 'peregrinating lecturer,' Dr. Marty promoted what he called public theology, or the confluence of fundamental cultural and religious conventions for the common good. He had 'a knack for translating complex ideas into graspable takeaways for diverse audiences,' Peter Marty wrote in an online tribute. Time magazine said he was 'generally acknowledged to be the most influential living interpreter of religion in the U.S.' He disdained extremism and fundamentalism, both by Islamist terrorists and right-wing Protestants. And he warned, in 'The One and the Many: America's Struggle for the Common Good' (1997), that the culture wars had undermined the ideals of e pluribus unum and challenged Americans' shared heritage. The nation had fractured, he wrote, between 'totalists,' who felt left behind and belittled, and 'tribalists,' whose individual pride in race, religion, ethnicity and gender circumscribed their vision of the American mosaic. The threat of such division to the American experiment was a theme he returned to frequently. 'Nothing is more important than to keep the richness of our pluralism alive,' Dr. Marty once wrote. 'To be aware of many different people and different ways, and deal with it.' In a review of Dr. Marty's 1991 book, 'Modern American Religion, Volume Two,' the Stanford historian David M. Kennedy wrote that 'For all the raucous contention he chronicles, Mr. Marty remains an optimist. It is, he concludes in an eloquent peroration, with a nod to James Madison, precisely the plurality of religious voices that has insured the integrity of the social fabric by preventing the lasting dominance of any single group.' Despite its historical ebb and flow, Dr. Marty insisted that mainstream Protestantism exerted profound influence over American public policy, particularly in the 19th century, though he predicted that no single denomination would ever exert the same degree of dominance again. 'Their winning — at least through their pioneering adventures on fronts dealing with civil rights, internationalism, ecumenism, many issues of sexuality and gender, friendliness to once-warred-against science, and much more — never meant complete victory,' he wrote in The Christian Century magazine in 2013. 'But it did mean,' he added, 'that through the years, at least, significant leaders risked much to express their faith beyond church walls, in the larger culture.' Dr. Marty was one of those leaders. He marched for civil rights in Selma, Ala., with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., attended the Second Vatican Council as a Protestant observer, and helped found the antiwar organization Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. He was president of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society of Church history, His scholarly achievements were legion. With a former student, R. Scott Appleby, he directed the six-year Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences beginning in 1988, which explored conservative religious movements. 'Only an intellectual giant with Marty's combination of multidisciplinary fluency and vast erudition could have foreseen the inbreaking of wave upon wave of modern anti-pluralist, anti-modernist assaults upon the liberal worldviews and institutions from the 'benighted' margins of Western and westernized societies,' Professor Appleby, who teaches global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, said in a statement after Dr. Marty's death. 'Marty stayed true to his instincts to come 'not to condemn, not to praise, but to understand,'' Professor Appleby added. In 1972 Dr. Marty won a National Book Award for 'Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America' (1971). Among his other books were 'A Short History of Christianity' (1959), 'A Cry of Absence' (1983), 'Pilgrims in Their Own Land: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America' (1984), and 'A Short History of American Catholicism' (1995). 'His published output was not only breathtaking but unparalleled among religious historians of any field,' Grant Wacker, an emeritus professor of Christian history at Duke University and a biographer of the Rev. Billy Graham, said in an email. 'His wit was legendary. And his heart overflowed with simple human kindness.' Writing for a Divinity School bulletin in 2018, Professor Wacker quoted an example: 'One of the real problems in modern life is that people who are good at being civil lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions lack civility.' Martin Emil Marty was born on Feb. 5, 1928, in West Point, Neb. His father, Emil, was a parochial school teacher and organist at Lutheran churches in Nebraska and Iowa. His mother was Anne Louise (Wuerdemann) Marty. A graduate of a Lutheran preparatory school, he attended Concordia College, Washington University and Concordia Seminary, where he earned a bachelor's in divinity in 1949 and a master's in 1952. He received a Master of Sacred Theology degree from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in 1954 and a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1956. As an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, he served as a pastor in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Chicago's suburbs. In 1963, he was hired as an associate professor of religious history at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught until 1998. In 1952 he married Elsa L. Schumacher; she died in 1981. In 1982, he married Harriet J. Meyer, a voice coach and the widow of a seminary classmate. In addition to his wife and his son Peter, the publisher of The Christian Century magazine, he is survived by three other sons from his first marriage, Joel, Micah and John, who is a Minnesota state senator; a foster daughter, Fran Garcia Carlson; a foster son, Jeff Garcia; a stepdaughter, Ursula Meyer; nine grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren. When he retired as a professor on his 79th birthday, the Divinity School honored him by naming the research center he founded in 1979 as the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion. Asked by the University of Chicago Magazine in 1998 how he'd like to be remembered, he said: 'That I was a good teacher. In the Mount Rushmore of American religious history and virtue, Professor Wacker once said fulsomely, Dr. Marty 'might well rank as the fourth member,' after Dr. King, Billy Graham and Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century Congregationalist theologian. 'For Marty, the only real swear word was tribalism — watching out for my interest, my family, my town, my country, my tribe — at the expense of others,' Professor Wacker said in an email. 'Everyone, and he meant everyone, deserved a seat at the table of public discussion as long as they were willing to play by the rules of civility and reasoned examination of the evidence.'
Chicago Tribune
27-02-2025
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Martin Marty, influential theologian whose prodigious output helped shape 20th century Christian thought, dies at 97
Martin E. Marty was an ordained Lutheran pastor, seminary professor and highly influential voice on religion who through more than 60 books and thousands of lectures, sermons and commencement addresses helped shape 20th century Christian thought. Marty taught for 35 years at the University of Chicago's Divinity School, where he helped shape two generations of religious scholars and church leaders. He also was a columnist and senior editor at the Chicago-based magazine The Christian Century for 50 years, and he frequently commented on major religious issues in interviews, lectures and articles he wrote. 'He served as kind of a bridge between mainline Christianity denominations like the Lutheran and the United Methodist churches, and he was an outstanding representative of that mainline and sometimes liturgical faith and at the same time, he had the complete respect of and appreciation from evangelical (Christians),' said Philip Yancey, an author who writes about Christian issues. 'There aren't many people who could pull that off and he did. I think he did so just because he got his facts right, he was fair, he was just and his integrity and the seriousness of his faith were without question,' Yancey said. Marty, 97, died of natural causes on Feb. 25 at a retirement community in Minneapolis, where he had lived since 2022. He previously lived in Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood and before that in west suburban Riverside. Martin Emil Marty was born in West Point, Nebraska. His father was a church organist who taught in Lutheran elementary schools, and Marty attended a Lutheran prep school. In 1952, he received what then was called a bachelor of divinity degree from Concordia Seminary near St. Louis. At the start of 1952, shortly before he was set to graduate and be ordained so he could take a dream job pastoring at a Lutheran church in London, the seminary's dean discovered that Marty and a classmate had concocted a campus hoax involving a fictitious and pompous German theologian named Franz Bibfeldt. Aimed at parodying self-important academics, the hoax included Marty writing a satirical review in a Concordia publication of a nonexistent book allegedly written by Bibfeldt, 'The Relieved Paradox.' A professor then tried to get hold of the book but couldn't find it, and Concordia's administration demanded an explanation. Concordia's dean revoked Marty's pastoral posting in London, instead sending him to serve as assistant to the pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest. He was ordained as a pastor in July 1952, and his boss at the River Forest church recommended he pursue a doctoral degree. Marty received a master's degree in sacred theology from Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary in Maywood in 1954, followed by a doctoral degree from the U. of C. in American religious and intellectual history in 1956. In 1956, Marty founded what became the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit in Elk Grove Village. He spent seven years at the Elk Grove Village church as it grew from 180 members to a congregation of 1,700. In 1963, the U. of C. hired Marty as an associate professor of modern Christian history in its Divinity School. Later promoted to full professor, Marty wrote widely, including books that were not scholarly in nature but aimed at the broader public. 'Dad had this amazing capacity to take abstract theological concepts or complex historical realities and reduce them to edible morsels that not only satisfied sophisticates and scholars present at a lecture, but that also delighted everyday people in the room who were just curious to learn about faith and culture,' said Marty's son Peter, who is the editor and publisher of The Christian Century. Retired University of Notre Dame professor Mark Noll, an expert on the history of Christianity, said Marty's background in the Lutheran church's Missouri synod gave him an understanding of conservative religion, while his membership in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America affirmed his own place as a moderate-to-progressive Christian. But 'he could never be rigidly typecast,' Noll said. 'He remained able to understand, appreciate and explain religious expression of all types and to do so charitably,' Noll said. Marty had a keen interest in church history, and was widely sought after to contextualize changes in the American church during the post-World War II years. 'The parish was perfectly designed for the preindustrial, pre-ecumenical, frontier situation,' Marty told the Tribune in 1970. 'When America passed over the hump of transition to urban, industrial, mass communicative, ecumenical society, it carried with it the modern congregational system as if it were predestined to be the exhaustive form of church life. Part of the attendance boom of the '50s was a quest for security after a war, coupled with a move to suburbia, a resurgence of town feeling and a sinking-in of roots.' In a 1966 essay in the Tribune, Marty examined the role of the theologian during that decade. 'Perhaps ours will be an epoch in which man finally pulls it off and goes it alone, moved once and for all beyond God and religion,' he wrote. 'The race may disappear altogether. But wherever there is despair, as well as signs of life and hope for the future, people seek meaning. At their side are Christian thinkers who realize the precariousness of human experience, the fragility of religious language and forms. Knowing of the silence of God, they have chosen to wait. God may speak; men may experience and hear Him. What theologians in the meantime come up with may not make all men comfortable. We should hardly be surprised at that.' By 1982, Marty was deemed one of the most influential figures in American religion, alongside evangelists Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, in a poll published in The Christian Century that surveyed the editors of religious magazines. In 1985, Marty was the founding president of the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith and Ethics, and from 1987 until 1995, he co-directed the Fundamentalism Project, a survey of global religious fundamentalism that was sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Launched from a modest third-floor office in Swift Hall on the U. of C. campus, the project wound up producing five encyclopedic volumes on the subject. 'He was a peacemaker. Jesus said, 'Blessed are the peacemakers,' and that includes addressing parts of faith that are negative and not positive,' Yancey said. 'Very few people could pull that off with the grace, integrity and authenticity that Martin Marty did.' Marty marched for civil rights in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and spoke out in favor of fair housing initiatives in 1967. And in 1974, he took aim at President Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, particularly as Ford invoked God in his pardon action. Marty called the pardon little more than 'cheap grace.' In 1986, Marty's name was floated as candidate to be the presiding bishop of a new national Lutheran church group that would be formed in 1988 via a merger of three separate Lutheran groups. The following year, he sent a letter informing his church superiors that he felt 'no call to the office of bishop.' In 1996, after Pope John Paul II stated that evolution is compatible with Christian faith, Marty told the Tribune that most mainstream Christian denominations take similar positions on the subject. 'The important thing for all theists is that humans are related to nature,' Marty said. 'That's why I think this (statement) has a lot more weight to it: You can keep the distinctiveness of the human as the image of God, and still see the human as part of this billions-years-long process.' After Marty retired from the U. of C. Divinity School in 1998, the university founded the Martin Marty Center, whose mission is the public understanding of religion. Marty also spent time on the Public Religion Project, a program he created to delineate the importance of faith in a pluralistic society. He led that initiative from 1996 until 1999. Marty also was an associate editor at The Christian Century for 50 years, beginning in 1956. He wrote some 40 columns a year for the magazine. Upon The Christian Century's centennial in 1984, Marty told the Tribune that the magazine had been 'the morale-builder, rallying point and representative for the mainline Protestant world.' Marty also edited Context, the biweekly newsletter of religious and cultural commentary, for 41 years. However, even Marty had his limits on topics he would speak about publicly. 'I avoid abortion, homosexuality and anything else where there is so much polarization that nobody will do any fresh thinking,' he told the Tribune in an interview upon his retirement in 1998, clad in his trademark bow tie and vest. 'I've always seen the role (of scholars) as being teachers to the nation.' In 2000, Marty served as interim president of St. Olaf College in Minnesota, whose board he had chaired. 'Any one of his activities would have been enough for a single busy individual — author of award-winning books, supervisor of more than 100 doctoral dissertations at the University of Chicago, columnist at The Christian Century for 50 years, much-in-demand speaker before elite and humble audiences, service on innumerable boards and committees,' Noll said. 'Yet somehow he did all these things without making himself or his achievements the center of attention.' President Bill Clinton honored Marty with a National Humanities Medal in 1997. He received a National Book Award in 1972 for his book 'Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America.' Peter Marty said that he felt that what set his father apart from so many peers 'was his ability to make anybody he was conversing with feel more important than he was. That was a gift of grace that lives on because of the sheer number of lives he impacted.' Marty's first wife of 29 years, Elsa, died of cancer in 1981. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife of 42 years, Harriet; three other sons, Joel, John and Micah; a stepdaughter, Ursula Meyer; two lifetime foster children, Fran García Carlson and Jeff García; nine grandchildren; and 18 great-grandchildren. A memorial service will take place at 1 p.m. on Saturday, March 29, at Central Lutheran Church, 333 S. 12th St. in Minneapolis.
