Medieval Academy of America's 1985 Haskins Medal. While at Yale, Pelikan won a contest sponsored by Field & Stream magazine for Ed Zern's column "Exit Laughing" to translate the motto of the Madison Avenue Rod, Gun, Bloody Mary & Labrador Retriever Benevolent Association ("Keep your powder, your trout flies and your martinis dry") into Latin. Pelikan's winning entry mentioned the martini first, but Pelikan explained that it seemed no less than fitting to have the apéritif come first. His winning entry: Semper siccandae sunt: potio Pulvis, et pelliculatio. Pelikan was appointed to numerous leadership positions in American intellectual life. He was the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. He was editor of the religion section of Encyclopædia Britannica, and, in 1980, he founded the Council of Scholars at the Library of Congress. In 1983 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him to deliver the 12th annual Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor conferred by the federal government for outstanding achievement in the humanities. Pelikan's lecture became the basis for his book The Vindication of Tradition. Pelikan gave the 1992–1993 Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen, which were published as the book Christianity and Classical Culture. President Bill Clinton appointed Pelikan to serve on the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Pelikan received honorary degrees from 42 universities around the world. At the age of 80, he was appointed scholarly director for the "Institutions of Democracy Project" at the Annenberg Foundation. In 2004, having received the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences, an honor he shared with the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, Pelikan donated his award of $500,000 to Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, of which he was a trustee. At the ceremony, he quoted a leitmotif passage from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that had moved him all his life: "Was du ererbt von deinen Vaetern hast, Erwirb es um es zu besitzen" ("Take what you have inherited from your fathers and work to make it your own."). Lutheran pastor to Orthodox layman For most of his life Pelikan was a Lutheran and was a pastor in that tradition. He was an ordained pastor in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod before becoming a member of a Lutheran Church in America congregation, which subsequently became part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).