Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. (December 17, 1923 – May 13, 2006) was an American scholar of the history of Christianity, Christian theology, and medieval intellectual history at Yale University. Early years Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. was born on December 17, 1923, in Akron, Ohio, to a Slovak father Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Sr. and Slovak mother Anna Buzekova Pelikan from Šid in Serbia. His father was pastor of Trinity Slovak Lutheran Church in Chicago, Illinois. His paternal grandfather was a Lutheran pastor in Chicago, and in 1902, a charter founder, and later president of, the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, which until 1958 was known as the Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Church, a strictly conservative orthodox church of the Augsburg Confession. According to family members, Pelikan's mother taught him how to use a typewriter when he was three years old because 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 an 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 St. Louis, Missouri, and a PhD at the University of Chicago. Writings and interviews 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. He said: Yale University professor He joined Yale University in 1962 as the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History and in 1972 was named Sterling Professor of History, a position he held until achieving emeritus status in 1996. He served as acting dean and then dean of the Graduate School from 1973 to 1978 and was the William Clyde DeVane Lecturer 1984–1986 and again in the fall of 1995. Awards include the Graduate School's 1979 Wilbur Cross Medal and the