Congregants at the Sedona Unitarian Universalist Fellowship mourn the recent passing, at 97, of Martin E. Marty, who was an Evangelical Lutheran minister, religious historian, prolific author, and staunch champion of pluralism.<\/p>\n
He marched for civil rights, with Martin Luther King Jr., in Selma, Ala., attended the Second Vatican Council as a Protestant observer, and helped found the antiwar organization Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam.\u00a0Marty\u00a0was president of the American Academy of Religion, won a 1972 National Book Award, and taught religious history at the University of Chicago Divinity School. \u00a0(Time magazine once described him as \u201cthe most influential living interpreter of religion in the U.S.\u201d)<\/p>\n
In his many books, Marty praised the contributions of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestantism to American life and chronicled the gradual decline of its cultural impact. He foresaw that no group would ever again dominate American religion, and he welcomed the resulting freedom to choose and the \u201cspace to try things,\u201d which have given American\u00a0religion the\u00a0vitality to empower its resilience.<\/p>\n
He worried about religious groups turning their backs on working together ecumenically and\u00a0collaborating to\u00a0address\u00a0matters of public concern. He decried\u00a0 over-emphasis on a privatized, personal faith and on\u00a0each\u00a0groups’\u00a0own institutional well-being.\u00a0 He valued the ideals of American\u2019s shared pluralist heritage and decried the political and cultural fracturing of the nation.<\/p>\n
He disdained extremism and\u00a0fundamentalism, both by Islamist terrorists and right-wing Protestants. And he warned that culture wars undermine the ideals of\u00a0e pluribus unum<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cNothing is more important than to keep the richness of our pluralism alive,\u201d \u00a0Marty once wrote. \u201cTo be aware of many different people and different ways, and deal with it.\u201d<\/p>\n For him, the only real swear word was \u201ctribalism \u2014 watching out for my interest, my family, my town, my country, my tribe \u2014 at the expense of others.\u201d He felt that everyone, and he meant everyone, deserved a seat at the table of public discussion as long as they were willing to play by the rules of civility and reasoned examination of the evidence.<\/p>\n He will be missed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Congregants at the Sedona Unitarian Universalist Fellowship mourn the recent passing, at 97, of Martin E. Marty, who was an Evangelical Lutheran minister, religious historian, prolific author, and staunch champion of pluralism. He marched for civil rights, with Martin Luther King Jr., in Selma, Ala., attended the Second Vatican Council as a Protestant observer, and … Continue reading UUs Mourn Dr. Rev. Martin E. Marty (#138)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8749"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9017,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8749\/revisions\/9017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}