Martin E. Marty, an eminent church historian, prolific chronicler and interpreter of religion and its role in public life, died at the age of 97 on Tuesday in a Minneapolis care facility where he spent his final years.
Marty, who was also a warmhearted friend, mentor and pastor to many, taught for 35 years at the University of Chicago Divinity School and published a constant stream of books, articles, essays, newsletters and columns, with his book Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America winning top honors at the 1972 National Book Awards in Philosophy and Religion.
In 1987 he published the first of his three-volume survey of religion in the 20th-century US, in which he described the impact of fundamentalism on the religious landscape, depicting fundamentalism as a reaction not to liberal religion or textual criticism of the Bible alone but to modernity itself and its increasing secularism.
