Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1963 to 1998 and where the Martin Marty Center has been founded to promote “public religion” endeavors. Dr. Marty was president of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History, and the American Catholic Historical Association. He also 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 now as 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.
Professor 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. He is the author of more than 50 books, 5,000 articles, and has written the three-volume Modern American Religion (University of Chicago Press 1986, 1990, 1996). Among his other noteworthy books are Righteous Empire (Dial 1970); Martin Luther (Penguin, 2004); The One and the Many: America’s Search for the Common Good (Harvard University Press 1997); a new edition of A Cry of Absence (Harper 1987); and with photographer Micha Marty, Places along the Way (Augsburg Fortress Publishers 1994); Our Hope for Years to Come (Augsburg Fortress Publishers 1995); The Promise of Winter (Wm. B. Eerdmans 1997); and When True Simplicity Is Gained (Wm. B. Eerdmans 1998). He is also a columnist for theChristian Century, on whose staff he has served since 1956 and editor of the semimonthly Context, a newsletter on religion and culture, since 1969.
Dr. Marty is the recipient of numerous honors, including 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). Marty is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and of the Society of American Historians and is an elected fellow of the American Philosophical Society. Marty has received 75 honorary doctorates.
