Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Book Review: The Education of David Martin: The Making of an Unlikely Sociologist by David Martin

The London School of Economics and Political Science - March 18, 2014

David Martin‘s autobiography offers surprising and often moving insights into his life, times and intellectual development. As Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the LSE he gives readers a behind-the-scenes account of the protests during the 1960s and 1970s, and  also recounts the ups and downs of his role in championing the King James Bible and the Prayer Book in the 1980s. Mike Gane recommends this humorous and witty read to LSE alumni, sociologists of religion and culture, and theologists.

The Education of David Martin: The Making of an Unlikely Sociologist. David Martin. SPCK London. November 2013.

David Martin spent many years at the LSE as sociologist of religion, and it is religion which is at the centre of this autobiography which is a very welcome addition to a growing number from academics who lived through the turbulent 1960s. Born in 1929, and coming late to the university, he is able to throw light on the ambience of the LSE and particularly the Department of Sociology in the years after 1962, and up to his departure for a position at the Southern Methodist University, Dallas, in 1986. He invites us to follow his ‘pilgrim’s progress’ from early childhood memories of Methodist family, church, and education that always involved musical participation to his arrival in the Church of England, a kind of late living vindication of the famous Halévy thesis on English social mobility. The Dorset landscape is experienced in his youth as ‘numinous’ and contrasted with ‘mundane’ life in Mortlake (pp 19-35), yet it is hard to find any instances of revelation, of experiential mystery, nothing on death. His religion, he says, was not intellectual; it was revivalist, in an account of how an established Protestant Christian tradition is lived, how its variations and departures are negotiated as a life-time education.

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