Martin E. Marty will kick off
W. Bruce Lincoln Endowed Lecture Series

by Tom Parisi

He marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., and was among the rare Protestant ministers participating in Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church’s historic summit meeting. His prolific writings have won more awards than some books have pages.

And he’s coming to NIU.

Martin E. Marty, one of the nation’s most prominent interpreters of religion and contemporary culture, will visit NIU on Monday, Oct. 11, to deliver the inaugural installment of the W. Bruce Lincoln Endowed Lecture Series.

Marty is professor emeritus of religious history at the University of Chicago. He is a Lutheran pastor, nationally known speaker, longtime columnist for The Christian Century magazine and author of more than 50 books, including “Righteous Empire,” for which he won the National Book Award.

Marty will speak at 7:30 p.m. in the newly refurbished Altgeld Hall Auditorium. The public lecture is titled, “The Christian East, the Christian West: Differences and Indifferences and the Difference They Make.”

The endowed lecture series is named in honor of W. Bruce Lincoln, a world-renowned historian of Russia who taught on the NIU faculty for more than three decades until his retirement in 1998. In 1982, Lincoln was among the first group of NIU faculty members awarded Presidential Research Professorships, an honor bestowed on the university’s top scholars.

The recipient of many grants and awards, Lincoln possessed a lifelong passion for learning and a gift for writing. Of the 12 books he authored, several gained a wide audience among the general public. He was one of the last authors to work with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in her role as senior editor at Doubleday Books in New York.

“While he was an historian, the research of Bruce Lincoln crossed many disciplines and appealed to a wide audience,” said Kenton Clymer, chair of the NIU Department of History. “To honor his memory, we intend to bring to campus prominent scholars who likewise have a wide appeal.”

Martin Marty would seem ideal to kick off the annual endowed lecture series, created by friends and family of Lincoln. Time Magazine has called Marty the nation’s “most influential interpreter of religion,” and the late Sen. Paul Simon once said he was “the Thomas Jefferson of the world of theology.”

Marty has served on two U.S. Presidential Commissions and as president of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History and the American Catholic Historical Association. In addition to the National Book Award, his numerous honors include the National Humanities Medal and the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

“Bruce would be delighted that Martin Marty is inaugurating his lecture series,” said NIU History Professor David Kyvig, a friend of both men.

“They overlapped at the University of Chicago where Bruce was a graduate student at the time Marty was a young professor,” Kyvig added. “Each came to have a high regard for the other’s work. Both have offered sophisticated analysis of the past in terms that engage a broad audience. They shared a belief in the importance of a historically well-informed public and a capacity to enthrall their audience.”

10-4-04