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Martin Marty's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Martin Marty recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Martin Marty's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
Recommended by Martin Marty, and 1 others.

Martin MartyI think the subtitle of this book gives you a clue as to why I included it. Fenn believed that humans and society are always dreaming of what he calls the perfect act. That would mean the ‘total thing’, where humans will have all the answers. Fenn thought that this impulse usually showed up in worship when people are addressing or bowing or somehow interacting with someone they cannot see. This... (Source)

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2

Out of Revolution

Autobiography of Western Man

Originally published in 1938, this book interprets modern Western history as a single 900-year period, initiated by total revolution, and punctuated thereafter by a series of total revolutions which broke out successively in the different European nations. less
Recommended by Martin Marty, and 1 others.

Martin MartyMany people might think of this as a strange choice, but it strongly influenced my interpretation of Bonhoeffer. (Source)

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3

The World Come of Age

An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology

On November 16, 2017, Pope Francis tweeted, "Poverty is not an accident. It has causes that must be recognized and removed for the good of so many of our brothers and sisters." With this statement and others like it, the first Latin American pope was associated, in the minds of many, with a stream of theology that swept the Western hemisphere in the 1960s and 70s, the movement known as liberation theology.

Born of chaotic cultural crises in Latin America and the United States, liberation theology was a trans-American intellectual movement that sought to speak for those parts of...
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Recommended by Martin Marty, and 1 others.

Martin MartyReaders today may be surprised to find out that a substantial interpretation of Bonhoeffer came from the Marxist author Mueller, in a book never translated but condensed in Smith’s book. Its author intended to shock people who knew Bonhoeffer as a Lutheran Christian theologian and participant in church life. Mueller helped make Bonhoeffer, for a time, the favoured theologian in Communist East... (Source)

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4
In this book Professor Markus's main concern is with those aspects of Augustine's thought which help to answer questions about the purpose of human society, and particularly with his reflections on history, society and the Church. He relates Augustine's ideas to their contemporary context and to older traditions, and shows which aspects of his thought he absorbed from his intellectual environment. Augustine appears from this study as a thinker who rejected the 'sacralization' of the established order of society, and the implications of this for a theology of history are explored in the last... more
Recommended by Martin Marty, and 1 others.

Martin MartyAlmost everyone who confronts this slim 47-year-old book testifies that it brought a fresh understanding of the monumental ancient Christian thinker, St Augustine. Why, you may ask, should he show up when we are trying to make sense of the world around us, and, in the present case, of Bonhoeffer’s letters? Well, what Augustine argued was quite radical. We think of him as one of the four or five... (Source)

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5

A Secular Age

Almost everyone would agree that the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly over the years. This book takes up the question of what these changes mean—of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others. less
Recommended by Martin Marty, and 1 others.

Martin MartyCharles Taylor, a Canadian Catholic philosopher, is among the most notable thinkers on these themes in North America these days. This is a massive, almost 800-page book that really attracted attention and debate. He argues that most can’t really make sense of the modern world or life today without some version or other of religion. He defines religion very broadly. He is not pointing to... (Source)

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