Of Martin Emil Marty, who died last week at the age of ninety-seven, it can honestly be said that what he knew could fill volumes. Over a seventy-year career as an historian of American religion, Marty—everyone but his children called him that—wrote or edited more than sixty of them. As a journalist as well as an academic, he also published over five thousand articles, essays, and book reviews. And then there are the more than 3,500 lectures he gave at nearly seven hundred colleges and universities all over the world. Then there are the 125 doctoral students whose dissertations he oversaw at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the countless sermons he preached as a Lutheran clergyman. He could do all this in part because he got up in the morning at precisely 4:44 a.m. and took ten-minute cat naps during the day. A very short list of the honors that came his way include the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and seventy-five honorary degrees.
So much for Marty by the numbers. They do not convey the man I knew and loved for nearly six decades—or what he did for journalists like me and our readers. In 1986, the religion editor of Time wrote that Marty “is generally acknowledged to be the most influential living interpreter of American religion.” But much of that influence was channeled through other influencers in the press—chiefly, the religion writers at Time, Newsweek, where I worked, the wire services, and dozens of major daily newspapers. We all read Context, Marty’s eight-page newsletter, published by the Claretian Fathers, on the impact of religion on American public life; his slyly named weekly column, M.E.M.O., in the Christian Century (now edited by his son Peter); Sightings, which continues as a newsletter published by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago; and New Theology, an annual paperback anthology of the major theological essays of the previous year edited by Marty and his Century colleague Dean Pearman. We all read Marty and Marty read us.
Marty had all the instincts of crack journalist. “Tell me three things I should know about you,” was often the way he encouraged conversation with strangers on first meeting. He was also a great noticer. In the late 1960s, for example, he was the first to notice that twenty-somethings were wearing crosses, stars of David, and crescent moons, along with various New Age symbols all on a single chain around the neck. It was an early sign of the spiritually promiscuous years to come.
Marty was also a gifted synthesizer, seeing patterns that escaped most others. Shortly after the close of the Second Vatican Council, Notre Dame University hosted a two-day conference featuring Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, and other Council periti, together with many of the Council’s Protestant observers. Marty, who had been one of those observers, was asked at the close of the conference to summarize what these theological luminaries had said. Marty chose to listen to them from backstage, where he kibitzed with the journalists who were following the proceedings on in-house television. But while we took notes, Marty wrote a series of lectures he was to give the following week at Southern Methodist University. At the close, he not only summarized the main arguments that emerged from some thirty-six speakers but went on to draw them into a creative dialectic.
A distinguishing feature of Marty’s books is concision. His National Book Award–winning history of the Protestant experience in America, Righteous Empire, is only 271 pages long. His biography of Martin Luther is a spare 189 pages. “Marty never saw the inside of an archive,” a close colleague of his once told me. That is probably an overstatement, but it does point to how Marty approached the writing of history. He understood that history is a form of storytelling and that the past is narratively constructed by historians as well as by individuals around the supper table. Facts matter, but so do insight and a shaping imagination.
The range of Marty’s reading was astonishing. Fortunately, he was a speed reader. Years ago, at a meeting of Catholics and Protestant scholars in Germany, Marty pulled me aside during cocktail hour to tell me that he was team-teaching a course that semester with Fr. David Tracy. “Every time I mention a book,” he said, “David’s already read it.” Half an hour later, Tracy beckoned me over to say that he was team-teaching a course with Marty. “Every time I mention a book,” he said, “Marty’s already reviewed it.”
Much of Marty’s academic writing was marked by two major preoccupations: the public character and impact of American religion and the inherent value of religious pluralism to the American experiment in ordered liberty. Those were the themes that endeared him to public figures like Bill Moyers and Norman Lear. But he also understood and appreciated the distinctive character of the country’s diverse religious traditions. It was Marty who urged me to take a look at denominational newspapers like Hawkeye Methodist and Badger Lutheran.
Marty liked to know where people came from because to him roots mattered. He himself hailed from tiny West Point, Nebraska, less than three square miles of Willa Cather country. Although he left Nebraska at age thirteen for a Lutheran prep school in Milwaukee, he read the West Point newspaper for the rest of his life. As an ordained minister he served several Lutheran congregations before becoming a full-time academic. Pastoring and mentoring students came naturally to him because both are forms of nurturing.
Marty was the father of four sons and two permanent foster children. When his first wife, Elsa, died of cancer, he molded his grief into A Cry of Absence, a book of meditations on the psalms framed by Karl Rahner’s description of “a wintry kind of spirituality.” He later married his seminary roommate’s widow, Harriet Meyer, a musician who survives him. They listened to Bach together, hummed together, prayed together, and over the years provided a private retreat for public Chicago figures like Fr. Andrew Greeley and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. He understood Catholicism from the outside in.
Recalling last week how often his father was on the road and absent from the dinner table when he and his siblings were growing up, Peter Marty, also a Lutheran pastor, hinted at the price of love. “I think all of us in the family had a deep sense that Dad…had a calling much larger than just our family.” He surely did.
