New Dimensions in American Religious History: Essays in Honor of Martin E. Marty

by Jay P. Dolan

This collection of essays has been written in tribute to Martin E. Marty, a scholar who has certainly earned his reputation as the most influential living interpreter of religion in America.
During his distinguished career - which includes over forty books, countless articles, and a generation of students - Marty has disentangled the jumbled and competing directions of American religious history by focusing on a central theme that has run through it all - the distinctively American experiment with pluralism.
These essays take stock of the significance of Marty's teaching to date by showing how his former students are following his leads - or moving beyond them - in their struggles to comprehend the richness of North American religious history. Some of the essays, explain the volume's editors, "celebrate the American search for oneness in spite of the efflorescent manyness of this nation's pluralism." Other essays remind us "that being American is seldom merely settling for oneness" by exploring the distinctiveness, schism, and conflict in this country's religious history. A third group of essays launches into new directions of historical inquiry, exploring varieties of religious expression that have previously been ignored.
A fitting tribute to Marty's impact on the study of religion in the last century, this volume presents a new generation of seekers finding its way across the broad range of North American religious experience, keeping the pluralistic experiment alive.

329 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1993