Jaroslav Pelikan
| Jaroslav Jan Pelikan | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
December 17, 1923 Akron, Ohio |
| Died | May 13, 2006 (aged 82) Hamden, Connecticut |
| Nationality | American |
| Awards | president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Concordia Seminary, University of Chicago |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Theology |
| Sub discipline | history of Christianity |
| Institutions | Yale University, |
| Notable works | The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine |
Jaroslav Jan Pelikan (December 17, 1923 – May 13, 2006) was a scholar of the history of Christianity, Christian theology and medieval intellectual history at Yale.
Jaroslav Jan Pelikan was born in Akron, Ohio, to a Slovak father and a Serbian mother, Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Sr. and Anna Buzekova Pelikan. His father was pastor of Trinity Slovak Lutheran Church in Chicago, Illinois, and his paternal grandfather a bishop of the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches then known as the Slovak Lutheran Church in America.
According to family members, Pelikan's mother taught him how to use a typewriter when he was three years old, as he could not yet hold a pen properly but wanted to write. Pelikan's facility with languages may be traced to his multilingual childhood and early training. That facility was to serve him well in the career he ultimately chose (after contemplating becoming a concert pianist)--as a historian of Christian doctrine. He did not confine his studies to Roman Catholic and Protestant theological history, but also embraced that of the Christian East.
In 1946 when he was 22, he earned both a seminary degree from Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis, Missouri and a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.
Pelikan wrote more than 30 books, including the five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (1971–1989). Some of his later works attained crossover appeal, reaching beyond the scholarly sphere into the general reading public (notably, Mary Through the Centuries, Jesus Through the Centuries and Whose Bible Is It?).
His 1983 Jefferson Lecture, The Vindication of Tradition included an often quoted one liner, which he elaborated in a 1989 interview in U.S. News & World Report.
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