
Authors /
Martin E. Marty
The Century contributing editor's name has been on the masthead since 1956. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago.
From declinism to discovery
Finitude, contingency, transience. These three linked words signal basic elements of what it is to be a human—and especially to be a historian....
August 21, 2013
Remembering Robert Bellah
Sociologists are reputed to be masters of suspicion, and many keep their distance from religious belief and practice. Robert Bellah’s field was the sociology of religion, and the longtime University of California, Berkeley professor—who died last week—certainly knew the value of “distance” in this and all human sciences. But as he studied people of faith and their practice—whether in “Tokugawa Religion” in Japan (his doctoral dissertation subject) or in America—he discerned integrity and value in the faith(s) of many.
August 8, 2013
Rough treatment
Barton Swaim, reviewing Elesha J. Coffman’s The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline for the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), wrote this:
Nor were the editors [of the Christian Century] above dirty tricks, at one point even hiring an investigative reporter to find some impropriety in [the Billy Graham] organization’s finances. None came to light, but in something of a scoop, Ms. Coffman has discovered documents linking the revered historian Martin Marty to the rough anti-Graham campaign.
As far as Coffman’s book goes, I have only the usual quibbles that a historian voices when reviewing the work of another historian. It is Swaim who is unfair to the magazine.
July 17, 2013
Chesterton, by Ralph C. Wood
Ralph Wood, who calls himself a Bapto-Catholic, is certainly qualified
to write on the militant Catholic Chesterton, who seldom withheld his
fire and fury except when he settled for expressing disdain for
Protestantism and other "unorthodox" versions of Christianity.
March 13, 2012
God, through Jesus Christ, welcomes you anyhow
The gospel begins
and ends with God. Jesus makes God's action good news. But the word
"Jesus" alone doesn't help me; such Jesus is a nice guy, but I need
Jesus Christ, God's anointed.
November 14, 2011
Compass and yeast
Thomas Merton's conversion to Catholicism is among the most celebrated of the last century. But to which kind of Catholicism did Merton convert?
July 21, 2011
Health-care conversion
David Heim recently highlighted
the article
in the June 9 issue of The New Republic
(subscribers only) by pioneer bioethicist Daniel Callahan and Sherwin B.
Nuland, author of How We Die.
According to Callahan and Nuland, our health-care system has for decades
"been waging an unrelenting war against disease," with dire effects
on the culture.
June 22, 2011
"A religious faith perhaps"
Those of us who enjoy poetry had good reason to be cheered
by a two-column...
March 10, 2011
The best possible light
Our nation's been in a momentary fit of proposing that we...
January 25, 2011
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The cost of buying in
Back when I was
co-directing a six-year study of militant religious fundamentalisms around the
world, critics used to ask me to define "modernity" and "modernization." To...
January 4, 2011
The austere and the sensual
Oh, to be in Rome or Paris this season, where one could...
December 10, 2010
What about the rest of the Catholic priests?
Some of the best things
that happen in these worst times occur among Roman Catholic priests. "Stop...
December 2, 2010
The worst times?
I am moved again by something dredged up from an old sermon:
the tomb-marker of Sir Robert Shirley, a baronet "whose singular praise it is
to have done the best things in the worst times, and to have hoped them in the
most calamitous."
November 22, 2010

A review of The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse
"No whining!" the plaque on my study wall all but shouts. Steven D.
Smith does not whine as he invades a territory frequented by whiners.
September 21, 2010