Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught for thirty-five years. He is the author of more than fifty books and the recipient of seventy-five honorary doctorates, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, and the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Marjorie Hall Thulin (1910-2009), for whom the annual lecture is named, was a 1931 graduate of the University of Illinois. She enjoyed a successful career in advertising and published poetry and children's literature in addition to editing a book on the history of Glencoe, Ill. Mrs. Thulin's desire for students to understand how religion grows and functions in a complex society, especially Christianity in American society, led her to endow a fund establishing the Marjorie Hall Thulin Scholar of Religion and Contemporary Culture. Through this endowment, each year an internationally known scholar of religion and contemporary culture is resident on the Champaign-Urbana campus for several days. A reception in the Spurlock Auditorium will follow the lecture. To learn more about the Thulin Lecture, please visit: http://www.religion.illinois.edu/news/thulin/.