David Martin, a sociologist of religion known especially for his critique of secularization as a theory of social process and his pioneering work on Pentecostalism in Latin America, is a professor emeritus of sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and honorary professor of the sociology of religion at Lancaster University. He is also an ordained priest in the Church of England attached as a non-stipendiary assistant to Guildford Cathedral. After completing his national service as a conscientious objector in the late 1940s, Dr. Martin attended the Westminster College of Education and served for seven years as a primary school teacher in London. During that time, he began evening courses in sociology at the University of London and received a first-class honors degree. He was awarded a scholarship to the LSE and took his Ph.D. in sociology in 1964. Two years earlier, after serving a year as an assistant lecturer at Sheffield University, he had been appointed to the LSE sociology faculty as a lecturer. He was promoted to reader in 1967 and named a professor in 1971, a post he held until his retirement in 1988. He had become Elizabeth Scurlock Professor of Human Values at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, in 1986 and continued to teach there until 1990. Dr. Martin has been a visiting professor at King's College, London, Lancaster University, Boston University, and Princeton Theological Seminary, as well as a visiting fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He has delivered invited lectures in Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Lebanon, and Finland and was awarded the Visiting Scholar's Medal and an honorary doctorate in theology from Helsinki University. A past president of the Science and Religion Forum, the Religion Section of the British Sociological Association, the International Conference for the Sociology of Religion, and the United Kingdom Committee for University Autonomy, he has been a member of the boards of directors of CORAT (Christian Organizations Research and Advisory Trust), St. Catharine's Royal Foundation, Culham College, the Higher Education Foundation, and the International Council for the Future of the University. He formerly served on the editorial advisory committee of the Encyclopedia Britannica and as editor for the religious studies section of the New International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The author of numerous articles in scholarly journals, Dr. Martin is an editor or co-editor of eleven books and the author of seventeen others, including Pacifism: An Historical and Sociological Study (1965), A General Theory of Secularization (1979), Tongues of Fire: Conservative Protestantism in Latin America (1990), Does Christianity Cause War? (1997), Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (2002), and, most recently, On Secularization: Notes Towards a Revised General Theory, which was published in 2005 by Ashgate. His latest work, co-authored with his wife Bernice Martin, is Betterment from on High: Evangelical Lives in Chile and Brazil and will be published in 2006 by Oxford University Press.