Marty receives first Martin E. Marty award

Martin Marty, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in the Divinity School and one of America's foremost theologians and religious historians, has received the inaugural Martin E. Marty Award in the Public Understanding of Religion. The award was presented by the American Academy of Religion at its annual joint meeting with the Society of Biblical Literature in late November.

Publishers Weekly noted that Marty "is in many ways the embodiment of the 'public scholar' that this new award was designed to recognize -- a teacher, researcher and author who is fully engaged in the culture as well as the academy."

A past president of the American Academy of Religion, Marty is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is the author of more than 45 books, the most recent of which is Under God, Indivisible: 1941-1960 (1996), the third volume in his Modern American Religion series.

Marty also recently received the Career Achievement Award presented by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. The award is given "only on the few occasions when truly extraordinary accomplishment needs to be recognized," according to Edward Lehman Jr., executive secretary of the society.

Additionally, Marty has been awarded a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to launch the Public Religion Project. The goals of the project are to link the different spheres of public life -- the media, the arts and entertainment industry, business, government and others -- to religious institutions so that religion is more often seen in a positive light.

Marty has been a member of the University faculty since 1963. He received his Ph.D. from Chicago in 1956.