Martin Marty

Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity in the University of Chicago Divinity School

RCCongress 2010 Panel Moderator:

Changing Society, Changing Media

Rev. Dr. Martin Marty, is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity in the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught for 35 years. The Martin Marty Center has been founded there to promote “public religion” endeavors.

An internationally known commentator on the church in society, Dr. Marty has been a regular columnist for The Christian Century, editor of Context, a newsletter on religion and culture, and weekly contributes to Sightings, an electronic editorial published by the Marty Center. He is the author of more than 5,000 articles and 50 books, including Righteous Empire, for which he won the National Book Award.

He 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.

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 has received 75 honorary doctorates.

Media Panel: How Social Change is Changing Media Coverage of Religion

Panelists will discuss how social, religious or media change has affected their work as journalists; how they've adapted reporting to new media models of communication; the role religion plays in today's media landscape; and the social (including religious) changes they anticipate reporting on in the next six months.

I find promise in questions such as: “What are the resources and intentions of faith-communities for dealing with conflict?”

Being “tolerant” unfortunately has come to mean: “As long as I can get you to believe as little as I do, we can get along fairly well,” which is a weak, unpromising complex.

I have chosen in recent years to speak of “risking hospitality” in the face of the stranger...

~ Martin Marty in A Life of Learning, 2006 (PDF file)