| | | William Martin (Ph.D, Harvard, 1969), is the Harry and Hazel Chavanne
Emeritus Professor of Religion and Public Policy in the Department of
Sociology at Rice. Since his retirement from teaching in June 2005, he
serves as the Chavanne Senior Fellow for Religion and Public Policy at
the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice. His areas
of specialization include religion, criminology, and issues related to
drug use and drug policy. He has been a professor at Rice since 1968.
Professor Martin's recent research and writing have
focused in two areas: 1) religious fundamentalism and its impact in the
political arena, in the United States and elsewhere; and 2) issues
related to drugs, with particular emphasis on ways to reduce the harms
associated with drug abuse and drug policy. In this connection, he has
organized and chaired a series of programs at conferences at the Baker
Institute dealing with these issues. These can be accessed through the
Baker Institute website at http://bakerinstitute.org/
After several years of experience as a boy preacher, Bill
Martin attended Abilene (Texas) Christian University, where he received
B.A. (1958) and M.A. (1960) degrees in Biblical Studies and taught for
one year as a graduate assistant. He then attended Harvard Divinity
School, where he received the B.D. degree in 1963. In 1969, he received
his Ph.D. from Harvard, in a program known as Religion and Society, a
joint effort between the Divinity School and the Department of Social
Relations. His dissertation, Christians in Conflict: The Role of the
Clergy in Racial Conflict in Rochester, New York, was prepared under
the direction of Harvey Cox, Joseph Fichter, and Thomas Pettigrew. At
Harvey Cox's suggestion, he submitted an article based on his thesis to
The Atlantic Monthly, which published it as the lead article in its
December 1967 issue. Flushed with the pleasure of having his work read
by large numbers, Bill Martin began to follow an unusual career path of
publishing mainly in high-quality magazines such as The Atlantic,
Harper's, Esquire, and Texas Monthly, for which he wrote a three-year
monthly series of articles on Texas churches that led to his being the
subject of a "60 Minutes" segment in September 1979.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Professor Martin concentrated
mainly on religious broadcasters and was one of the first academicians
to give serious attention to what came to be known as the Electronic
Church. At the end of the 1970s, this led naturally to increased
attention to fundamentalist involvement in politics and the rise of the
movement known as the Religious Right. This work culminated, after
dozens of articles, in his writing With God on Our Side: The Rise of
the Religious Right in America (Broadway Books, 1996), the companion
volume to the PBS mini-series of the same name and for which he served
as chief consultant. A revised edition of both the book and the video
series appeared in the summer of 2005. His writings on various aspects
of evangelical and fundamentalist religion also led to his being given
the opportunity write A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story
(William Morrow, 1991), regarded as the most authoritative biography of
the famed evangelist. An updated version of this book is in progress.
In addition to these historical and sociological publications,
Professor Martin also wrote My Prostate and Me: Dealing with Prostate
Cancer (Caddell and Davies, 1994), an account of his own successful
bout with this disease. As a result, he has appeared on more than 150
radio and television programs to discuss prostate cancer and regularly
counsels with men and families touched by the disease.
More recently, as noted above, Bill Martin has taken an
active role in the Baker Institute, organizing and chairing programs
and conferences on the impact of religion, particularly various forms
of fundamentalism, on public policy, and on ways to reduce the harms
associated with drug abuse and drug policy. Many of these papers are
available on the Baker Institute website. (The original webcasts of the
programs are also available in the video archives section of the
website.)
Bill Martin received a number of teaching awards during
his years as a professor, including the George R. Brown Life Honor
Award, which made him ineligible for most additional awards given by
Rice. At age sixteen, he decided to become a college professor as a
consequence of exposure to particularly inspiring and dedicated
teachers he encountered during his freshman year in college. As he
enters partial retirement after more than thirty-seven years at Rice,
he still regards it as a fine decision. | | | | | |
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