Martin Marty

Martin Marty

Award-winning author and professor emeritus, University of Chicago

Martin E. Marty is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught religious history, chiefly in the Divinity School, for 35 years, and where the Martin Marty Center has been founded to promote “public religion” endeavors. For a decade prior to entering academia, the “On Faith” panelist served parishes in the west and northwest suburbs of Chicago as an ordained Lutheran pastor. Marty is the author of more than 50 books including Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (1970), for which he won the National Book Award. His additional honors include the National Humanities Medal, 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 served as 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 the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Public Religion Project at the University of Chicago. He is Senior Regent of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Close.

Martin Marty

Award-winning author and professor emeritus, University of Chicago

Martin E. Marty is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught religious history, chiefly in the Divinity School, for 35 years, and where the Martin Marty Center has been founded to promote “public religion” endeavors. more »

Main Page | Martin Marty Archives | On Faith Archives


Pagans

To the second question: would I vote for a pagan?
[I doubt if one will rise to candidacy for president, but as for other offices:'
Would I vote for a pagan? I probably already have.
They come in many informal forms.

To the first question, about chaplaincy:
Some years ago I spoke to the chaplains' committee on endorsement, or whatever it is called: they check the credentials of the religious groups that want to be represented in chaplaincy. I've studied American religion for decades, but those two days I heard testimony from any number of groups that want to be in on the act.
Curiously, while Catholics, Jews, mainline Protestants are not producing enough chaplains--in part because their religious bodies have more dissesnters against recent wars, the less familiar, small, and, to others, "exotic" groups were ready to go. In some senses, it seemed that they welcomed this credentialing.
So it may be with Pagans.
since Chaplains are supposed to serve people of many faiths, and most do, it may be hard to picture many non-pagans welcoming services by pagan priests.
Still, on church-state grounds it's hard to know on what principle to rule them out: one does not want the government being the determiner of what is a legitimate religion and what isn't.
Some folks on both sides of this issue will get emotional about it, and most of the rest of the military and civilian citizenry will go about its business the same way, whether or not . . . .

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