In 1998, however, he and his wife Sylvia left the ELCA and were received into the Orthodox Church in America at the Chapel of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, New York. According to family members, his conversion followed his meeting Pope John Paul II. Members of Pelikan's family remember him saying that he had not as much converted to Orthodoxy as "returned to it, peeling back the layers of my own belief to reveal the Orthodoxy that was always there". Delighted with this turn of phrase, he used it (or close variants) several times among family and friends, including during a visit to St. Vladimir's for Divine Liturgy, the "last before his death." Nevertheless, Pelikan was still ecumenical in many ways. Not long before his own death, he praised Pope John Paul II in an article in The New York Times when the pope died in 2005: It will be a celebration of the legacy of Pope John Paul II and an answer to his prayers (and to those of all Christians, beginning with their Lord himself) if the Eastern and Western churches can produce the necessary mixture of charity and sincere effort to continue to work toward the time when they all may be one. Death Pelikan died on May 13, 2006, at his home in Hamden, Connecticut, at the age of 82, after a seventeen-month battle with lung cancer. He was interred at Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 17, 2006. Pelikan was honored by a memorial service in Yale's Battell Chapel on October 10, 2006, with speeches by distinguished scholars and musical performances by cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Yale Russian Chorus. Selected bibliography From Luther to Kierkegaard: A Study in the History of Theology. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House (ed.) Martin Luther's works (1955–1969) multiple volumes LUTHER'S WORKS, Companion Volume, "LUTHER THE EXPOSITOR: Introduction to the Reformer's Exegetical Writings,"(1959) St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (1959) "The Shape of Death: Life, Death, and Immortality in the Early Fathers (1961) Abingdon Press The Light of the World: A Basic Image in Early Christian Thought (1962) Harper and Brothers The Finality of Jesus Christ in an Age of Universal History: A Dilemma of the Third Century (1966) Development of Christian Doctrine: Some Historical Prolegomena (1969) The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols. (1973–1990). Chicago: