1991 Tanner-McMurrin Lecture

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Jaroslav Pelikan
Sterling Professor of History at Yale University

“Jesus, Not Caesar. The Religious World View of Thomas Garrigue Masaryk and the Spiritual Foundations of Czech and Slovak Culture”
Lecture Resources

Lecture was given: Thursday, March 7, 1991 7:00p.m. Gore Auditorium
Seminar was held: Friday, March 8, 1991 11:00a.m. Nunemaker Place

Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, is a noted scholar in medieval intellectual history and is recognized as the leading authority on the evolution of Christianity. He is the author of a series of award-winning volumes on the history of religion.
A member of the Yale faculty since 1962, Professor Pelikan held the Titus Street Professorship of Ecclesiastical History until 1972, when he was named to the Sterling Chair. He headed the Yale Graduate School as acting dean in 1973-74 and served as dean from 1975-1978. He was chairman of the interdepartmental medieval studies program in 1974-75 and again from 1978-1980. He has been chairman of the publications committee of the Yale University press since 1960.

In 1983, Dr. Pelikan was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the 12th annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the highest honor conferred by the U.S. government for outstanding achievement in the humanities. His lecture was published in book form in September of 1984 under the title The Vindication of Tradition.
In January of 1984, Professor Pelikan was appointed to Yale’s prestigious William Clyde DeVane Professorship in the Humanities for a three-year term. As the incumbent of the chair, he was able to address one of his strongest concerns—that undergraduate education not become excessively narrow and departmentalized.

Dr. Pelikan has been selected to give the Gifford Lectures in Scotland during the 1992 and 1993 spring terms. As the recipient of this honor, considered the most prestigious scholarly award in the English-speaking world, Professor Pelikan will deliver a series of 20 lectures at the University of Aberdeen on “The Transfiguration of Natural Theology in the Christian Dialogue with Hellenism.” The Gifford Lectureship has often been compared in status with the Nobel Prize.

His scholarly books on the history of Christianity have reaped numerous honors. In 1971 he received the American Catholic Historical Association’s Shea Prize for his book, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition. The book was Volume I of a five-part history titled The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. In reviewing the work, Newsweek magazine described Pelikan as “the scholar’s scholar” and cited him for his “enormous erudition.

His other works include Historical Theology (1971); Development of Christian Doctrine (1969); and Spirit versus Structure: Luther and the Institutions of the Church (1968).

A native of Akron, Ohio, he is a graduate of Concordia Junior College. He received his Bachelor of Divinity degree form Concordia Theological Seminary in 1946 and his doctorate from the University of Chicago that same year.

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Jaroslav Pelikan Lecture