News
Martin E. Marty, Influential Religious Historian, Dies at 97
Martin E. Marty, a pre-eminent religious historian, prolific author, dependable exponent of mainstream Protestantism and staunch champion of pluralism, died on Tuesday in Minneapolis. He was 97.
His death at a retirement home, where he had lived since 2022, was confirmed by his son Peter.
In more than 60 books, thousands of articles and as what he described as a “peregrinating lecturer,” Dr. Marty promoted what he called public theology, or the confluence of fundamental cultural and religious conventions for the common good.
He had “a knack for translating complex ideas into graspable takeaways for diverse audiences,” Peter Marty wrote in an online tribute. Time magazine said he was “generally acknowledged to be the most influential living interpreter of religion in the U.S.”
He disdained extremism and fundamentalism, both by Islamist terrorists and right-wing Protestants. And he warned, in “The One and the Many: America’s Struggle for the Common Good” (1997), that the culture wars had undermined the ideals of e pluribus unum and challenged Americans’ shared heritage.
The nation had fractured, he wrote, between “totalists,” who felt left behind and belittled, and “tribalists,” whose individual pride in race, religion, ethnicity and gender circumscribed their vision of the American mosaic.
The threat of such division to the American experiment was a theme he returned to frequently.
“Nothing is more important than to keep the richness of our pluralism alive,” Dr. Marty once wrote. “To be aware of many different people and different ways, and deal with it.”
In a review of Dr. Marty’s 1991 book, “Modern American Religion, Volume Two,” the Stanford historian David M. Kennedy wrote that “For all the raucous contention he chronicles, Mr. Marty remains an optimist. It is, he concludes in an eloquent peroration, with a nod to James Madison, precisely the plurality of religious voices that has insured the integrity of the social fabric by preventing the lasting dominance of any single group.”
Despite its historical ebb and flow, Dr. Marty insisted that mainstream Protestantism exerted profound influence over American public policy, particularly in the 19th century, though he predicted that no single denomination would ever exert the same degree of dominance again.
“Their winning — at least through their pioneering adventures on fronts dealing with civil rights, internationalism, ecumenism, many issues of sexuality and gender, friendliness to once-warred-against science, and much more — never meant complete victory,” he wrote in The Christian Century magazine in 2013.
“But it did mean,” he added, “that through the years, at least, significant leaders risked much to express their faith beyond church walls, in the larger culture.”
Dr. Marty was one of those leaders.
He marched for civil rights in Selma, Ala., with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., attended the Second Vatican Council as a Protestant observer, and helped found the antiwar organization Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. He was president of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society of Church history,
His scholarly achievements were legion. With a former student, R. Scott Appleby, he directed the six-year Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences beginning in 1988, which explored conservative religious movements.
“Only an intellectual giant with Marty’s combination of multidisciplinary fluency and vast erudition could have foreseen the inbreaking of wave upon wave of modern anti-pluralist, anti-modernist assaults upon the liberal worldviews and institutions from the ‘benighted’ margins of Western and westernized societies,” Professor Appleby, who teaches global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, said in a statement after Dr. Marty’s death.
“Marty stayed true to his instincts to come ‘not to condemn, not to praise, but to understand,’” Professor Appleby added.
In 1972 Dr. Marty won a National Book Award for “Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America” (1971).
Among his other books were “A Short History of Christianity” (1959), “A Cry of Absence” (1983), “Pilgrims in Their Own Land: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America” (1984), and “A Short History of American Catholicism” (1995).
“His published output was not only breathtaking but unparalleled among religious historians of any field,” Grant Wacker, an emeritus professor of Christian history at Duke University and a biographer of the Rev. Billy Graham, said in an email. “His wit was legendary. And his heart overflowed with simple human kindness.”
Writing for a Divinity School bulletin in 2018, Professor Wacker quoted an example: “One of the real problems in modern life is that people who are good at being civil lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions lack civility.”
Martin Emil Marty was born on Feb. 5, 1928, in West Point, Neb. His father, Emil, was a parochial school teacher and organist at Lutheran churches in Nebraska and Iowa. His mother was Anne Louise (Wuerdemann) Marty.
A graduate of a Lutheran preparatory school, he attended Concordia College, Washington University and Concordia Seminary, where he earned a bachelor’s in divinity in 1949 and a master’s in 1952. He received a Master of Sacred Theology degree from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in 1954 and a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1956.
As an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, he served as a pastor in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Chicago’s suburbs. In 1963, he was hired as an associate professor of religious history at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught until 1998.
In 1952 he married Elsa L. Schumacher; she died in 1981. In 1982, he married Harriet J. Meyer, a voice coach and the widow of a seminary classmate.
In addition to his wife and his son Peter, the publisher of The Christian Century magazine, he is survived by three other sons from his first marriage, Joel, Micah and John, who is a Minnesota state senator; a foster daughter, Fran Garcia Carlson; a foster son, Jeff Garcia; a stepdaughter, Ursula Meyer; nine grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren.
When he retired as a professor on his 70th birthday, the Divinity School honored him by naming the research center he founded in 1979 as the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion.
Asked by the University of Chicago Magazine in 1998 how he’d like to be remembered, he said: “That I was a good teacher.”
In the Mount Rushmore of American religious history and virtue, Professor Wacker once said fulsomely, Dr. Marty “might well rank as the fourth member,” after Dr. King, Billy Graham and Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century Congregationalist theologian.
“For Marty, the only real swear word was tribalism — watching out for my interest, my family, my town, my country, my tribe — at the expense of others,” Professor Wacker said in an email. “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.”
News
Second US aircraft carrier is being sent to the Middle East, AP source says, as Iran tensions high
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States will send the world’s largest aircraft carrier to the Middle East to back up another already there, a person familiar with the plans said Friday, putting more American firepower behind President Donald Trump’s efforts to coerce Iran into a deal over its nuclear program.
The USS Gerald R. Ford’s planned deployment to the Mideast comes after Trump only days earlier suggested another round of talks with the Iranians was at hand. Those negotiations didn’t materialize as one of Tehran’s top security officials visited Oman and Qatar this week and exchanged messages with the U.S. intermediaries.
Already, Gulf Arab nations have warned any attack could spiral into another regional conflict in a Mideast still reeling from the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, Iranians are beginning to hold 40-day mourning ceremonies for the thousands killed in Tehran’s bloody crackdown on nationwide protests last month, adding to the internal pressure faced by the sanctions-battered Islamic Republic.
The Ford’s deployment, first reported by The New York Times, will put two carriers and their accompanying warships in the region. Already, the USS Abraham Lincoln and its accompanying guided-missile destroyers are in the Arabian Sea.
The person who spoke to The Associated Press on the deployment did so on condition of anonymity to discuss military movements.
Ford had been part of Venezuela strike force
It marks a quick turnaround for the Ford, which Trump sent from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean last October as the administration build up a huge military presence in the lead-up to the surprise raid last month that captured then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
It also appears to be at odds with Trump’s national security strategy, which put an emphasis on the Western Hemisphere over other parts of the world.
Trump on Thursday warned Iran that failure to reach a deal with his administration would be “very traumatic.” Iran and the United States held indirect talks in Oman last week.
“I guess over the next month, something like that,” Trump said in response to a question about his timeline for striking a deal with Iran on its nuclear program. “It should happen quickly. They should agree very quickly.”
Trump told Axios earlier this week that he was considering sending a second carrier strike group to the Middle East.
Trump held lengthy talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday and said he insisted to Israel’s leader that negotiations with Iran needed to continue. Netanyahu is urging the administration to press Tehran to scale back its ballistic missile program and end its support for militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah as part of any deal.
The USS Ford set out on deployment in late June 2025, which means the crew will have been deployed for eight months in two weeks time. While it is unclear how long the ship will remain in the Middle East, the move sets the crew up for an usually long deployment.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ford’s deployment comes as Iran mourns
Iran at home faces still-simmering anger over its wide-ranging suppression of all dissent in the Islamic Republic. That rage may intensify in the coming days as families of the dead begin marking the traditional 40-day mourning for the loved ones. Already, online videos have shown mourners gathering in different parts of the country, holding portraits of their dead.
One video purported to show mourners at a graveyard in Iran’s Razavi Khorasan province, home to Mashhad, on Thursday. There, with a large portable speaker, people sang the patriotic song “Ey Iran,” which dates to 1940s Iran under the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. While initially banned after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran’s theocratic government has played it to drum up support.
“Oh Iran, a land of full of jewels, your soil is full of art,” they sang. “May evil wishes be far from you. May you live eternal. Oh enemy, if you are a piece of granite, I am iron.”
___
Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.
Nancy Guthrie’s case has drawn wide attention, in part because of the unique circumstances of her disappearance. She’s seen here alongside other people who are listed on the FBI’s Kidnappings and Missing Persons page as of Thursday morning./FBI/ Screenshot by NPR
The abduction of Nancy Guthrie is putting a spotlight on the excruciating uncertainty endured by thousands of families whose loved ones go missing each year. Experts see parallels with those cases, even as many details in Guthrie’s case are unique, from the victim’s age to her celebrity daughter, Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie.
The circumstances of Guthrie’s disappearance are “quite shocking,” says Jesse Goliath, a forensic anthropologist at Mississippi State University.
“Usually you hear about smaller children, juveniles that go missing” and attracting national press, Goliath says. “But having an older woman who’s gone missing and having [a daughter] that you’ve seen on TV every day” is extraordinary, he adds.
More than 500,000 people were reported missing in the U.S. last year, according to the Justice Department. But Tara Kennedy, media representative for the Doe Network, a volunteer group working to identify missing and unidentified persons, says high-profile kidnappings are rare.
“I can’t remember the last time I heard about a ransom case besides Guthrie,” says Kennedy, who has worked with the Doe Network since 2014. “I always associate them with different periods in American history, like the Lindbergh kidnapping, not someone’s mother from the Today show.”
Both Kennedy and Goliath describe the Guthrie case as “strange.” Here’s a rundown of things it has in common with other missing-persons cases, and why it’s unusual:
Key details that are “unheard of”
From June 2020 to June 2025, women comprised more than 75% of the victims in the some 240,000 cases of kidnappings or abductions that were reported in the U.S., according to FBI crime data. But of those, only 646 women were in their 80s like Nancy Guthrie, who is 84, or less than .2% of all victims. Compare that to the age group that accounted for the largest number of victims that year: people 20-29, who made up just shy of 30% of victims.
Other highly unusual revelations have emerged as her disappearance has persisted: from purported ransom notes sent to media outlets demanding millions of dollars to unsettling images of a masked gunman approaching Guthrie’s front door on the night she disappeared.
Taken together, it’s like something out of a true crime novel, Goliath says: “That’s something unheard of.”
In missing-person cases, a quick response is crucial
TV shows have helped perpetuate a myth that families have to wait 24 hours before reporting a loved one as missing. But some shows and movies do get one thing right: The first 24 to 48 hours are critical to locating someone who has disappeared.
“Usually a lot of them are going to be [found] within 24 hours, especially the juvenile and young adult cases,” Goliath says.
In that early timeframe, eyewitness reports might be more useful; sniffer dogs will have a fresher scent to follow; and surveillance video and other electronic data is more likely to be intact and helpful.
“The longer the person is missing, the more difficult it becomes” to find them, Kennedy says, citing decades-old unresolved cases.
Then there’s the victim’s health. Whether the subject of a search operation wandered off and got lost, or was abducted or trafficked, Goliath notes that after 48 hours, their well-being could be compromised — by the elements, or by health issues such as Nancy Guthrie’s pacemaker and her need for daily medication.
“Sadly, if that person is not found within that first two days, their chances of survival drop exponentially,” Goliath says.
Who are the people who go missing in the U.S.?
At any given moment, about 100,000 people are considered missing in the U.S., according to Goliath and Kennedy. At the end of 2024, for instance, the National Crime Information Center — listed more than 93,000 active missing-persons cases in the U.S., while a total of 533,936 cases were entered into the federal tracking system that year.
Of those cases, more than 60% — or roughly 330,000 — involved juveniles, according to the NCIC database, which law enforcement agencies use to share criminal warrants, missing-person alerts, and other records.
Among people who are reported missing, Goliath says there is an “overrepresentation of Black and Indigenous populations who go missing, especially females, across the United States.”
In Mississippi, he adds, “Our highest demographic of missing [persons] is young Black females.”
Black Americans are also overrepresented in abductions. While members of the group make up less than 15% of the U.S. population, they account for more than 25% of the victims in reported abductions or kidnappings, according to the FBI’s data.
But a large number of missing-persons cases also go unreported, because some communities, such as people of color or those who don’t have documented status in the U.S., are less likely to engage with authorities. And Goliath notes that Indigenous people living on reservations might have limited access to law enforcement.
Another dynamic that skews public perception, Kennedy says, is “missing white woman syndrome,” when national media become fixated on a white woman who has disappeared.
“As someone who researches cold cases in terms of looking for information, the disparity of information out there, of cases for people of color is ridiculous,” she says.
Calling for action, easier ways to share data
Goliath says every missing-person case, not just Guthrie’s, needs to be widely broadcast and shared, to increase the chance of bringing someone home.
“We call this a silent crisis,” he says, “that there are people missing in the United States, throughout the country that really don’t have that same social media representation or a nationwide media representation for their cases.”
It’s also difficult to find standardized data for missing persons, due to a patchwork of rules and resources. It’s only mandatory for law enforcement agencies across the country to report missing persons cases to the federal government if they involve minors, for instance.
In addition to NCIC, missing persons data is collected by NamUs (the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System), which offers public access. But as of now, only 16 states require mandatory reporting to the NamUs clearinghouse for missing persons cases.
Goliath says he’d like to see a nationwide push for more states to adopt NamUs requirements. As NPR reported last year, a large portion of U.S. police agencies weren’t listed in the system.
“That’d be a help, because it’s already a system that exists,” Goliath says. “Law enforcement already is doing it. So, let’s just have all the states be able to use NamUs.”
The top 10 countries that gave contracts and gifts to U.S. colleges and universities as of December 16, 2025.
Screenshot by NPR/The U.S. Department of Education
hide caption
toggle caption
Screenshot by NPR/The U.S. Department of Education
U.S. colleges received more than 5 billion dollars in reportable foreign gifts and contracts in 2025, according to a new website from the U.S. Education Department. The release is part of a push by the Trump administration to make foreign influence in colleges and universities more transparent.
Among the biggest recipients, the data show, are Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University.
Qatar was the largest foreign source of funds to schools, making up more than 20% — or about 1.1 billion. Other sources include the United Kingdom, China, Switzerland and Japan.
In a statement, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the data provide “unprecedented visibility into funding” from countries that threaten “America’s national security.”
Under existing federal law, institutions are required to report gifts or contracts from foreign entities above $250,000. But Republicans have long raised underreporting as an issue of national security — pushing for more reporting and more transparency.
Since the start of President Trump’s second term, the administration has investigated Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, for allegedly underreporting their foreign gifts.
Ian Oxnevad, a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars, a conservative advocacy organization, called the release of the new information a “step in the right direction.”
He said the data brings welcome transparency to the sometimes murky world of foreign gifts to U.S. colleges. This data sheds light on “specific countries, what universities they donate to, and the amounts.“
Among the significant revelations, he noted, are that “Qatar and China are among the top countries that donate to our universities, and not our allies or neighbors.”
The new website includes data on what McMahon called “countries of concern,” including China, Russia and Iran. Harvard, New York University and MIT top the list of schools getting money from those countries.
It’s important, Oxnevad said, given the role that universities such as Harvard and other Ivy League schools play in shaping public policy, to be aware that they’re “getting such heavy foreign funds.”
Universities have said they are in compliance with the law.
“MIT research on campus, regardless of funding source, is open and publishable,” the university said in a statement. “We follow all federal laws in accepting and reporting any such gifts or contracts.”
The American Council on Education, a member organization that represents and advocates for colleges and universities, echoed that sentiment.
“This demonstrates that our institutions are doing a good job reporting this information,” says Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff at ACE.
Both Spreitzer and Oxnevad pointed out limitations in the data on the website, including a lack of details or an ability to compare years and see trends over time. Both were critical of the government’s tracking and reporting of this information under past administrations.
But Spreitzer added that some of the information, without more context or detail, is misleading, or at best dated.
“I worry that [the administration] is trying to send a message to taxpayers that our institutions are taking a lot of money from foreign donors,” says Spreitzer. “We are all for more transparency.”
Her concern though, she said, is how the Trump administration will use this data in its continuing attacks on higher education.
More than 5,000 ISIL detainees transferred from Syria, says Iraqi ministry
Second US aircraft carrier is being sent to the Middle East, AP source says, as Iran tensions high
Beloved sandcastle artist booted from California beach by luxury hotel after nearly 20 years
Early missteps, delayed search plane response emerge in Savannah Guthrie’s mother disappearance
Rep. Steve Cohen tells Pam Bondi that ‘worst of the worst’ are native-born Americans, not immigrants
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
More than 5,000 ISIL detainees transferred from Syria, says Iraqi ministry
Second US aircraft carrier is being sent to the Middle East, AP source says, as Iran tensions high
Tim Walz demands federal government ‘pay for what they broke’ after Homan announces Minnesota drawdown
Leaders embrace two-speed Europe as Macron sets June deadline
What the data tells us about kidnapped people — and how Nancy Guthrie is an outlier
-
Politics1 week agoWhite House says murder rate plummeted to lowest level since 1900 under Trump administration
-
Alabama6 days agoGeneva’s Kiera Howell, 16, auditions for ‘American Idol’ season 24
-
Politics1 week agoTrump unveils new rendering of sprawling White House ballroom project
-
San Francisco, CA1 week agoExclusive | Super Bowl 2026: Guide to the hottest events, concerts and parties happening in San Francisco
-
Ohio1 week agoOhio town launching treasure hunt for $10K worth of gold, jewelry
-
Culture1 week agoAnnotating the Judge’s Decision in the Case of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-Year-Old Detained by ICE
-
Culture1 week agoIs Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ Actually the Greatest Love Story of All Time?
-
News1 week agoThe Long Goodbye: A California Couple Self-Deports to Mexico