The Rev. Dr. Martin E. Marty

Denomination: Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA)

• The Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at theUniversityofChicago, where he taught for 35 years, chiefly intheDivinitySchool,where theMartinMartyCenterfor advanced studies has since been founded, and in the History Department.

• Columnist  for and Senior Editor at the Christian Century for decades after 1956 and now a writer for its blog.

• Editor  of the semimonthly Context, a newsletter on religion and culture, from 1969 to 2010.

• Weekly contributor  to Sightings, an electronic editorial published by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School

• Lutheran pastor,  ordained in 1952. He served parishes in the west and northwest suburbs of Chicago for a decade before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1963. While serving his internship in Washington, D.C., he served for the year 1950-1951 as Interim Pastor of Pilgrim Lutheran Church in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

• Author  of more than 60 books. Among them are are Righteous Empire, for which he won the National Book Award; the three-volume Modern American Religion; The One and the Many: America's Search for the Common Good; The Mystery of the Child; Building Cultures of Trust; The Christian World: A Global History; Martin Luther (in the "Penguin Lives" series); and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison: A Biography. He has also collaborated with photographer Micah Marty in producing Places Along the Way; Our Hope for Years to Come; The Promise of Winter; and When True Simplicity Is Gained.

• Author, edtior, coauthor, coeditor, or contributor  to hundreds of books and more than 5,000 articles, many of which are accessible on the web.

• Past president and director  of several associations, institutions, and projects. Marty was 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 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 (sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust). 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. (The Martin Marty Chair at the college is designed to advance its religious program and emphases.)

• 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, the Order of Lincoln Medallion (Illinois' top honor), and 80 honorary doctorates. He is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and of the American Philosophical Society and is the Mohandas M. K. Gandhi Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. He is also an admiral in the Great Navy of Nebraska.

• Vita:  Marty was born in West Point, Nebraska, on February 5, 1928. He and his wife Harriet, a musician, enjoy an extended family of seven children, including two who joined the family as foster children, nine grandchildren, and 11 great-grandchildren.