Jaroslav Jan Pelikan was born on 17 December 1923 in Akron, Ohio. A scholar of ecclesiastical history and historical theology, Pelikan was appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities by Bill Clinton. Lecturer at Valparaiso University in 1946, he moved to Concordia Theological Seminary in 1949, followed by the University of Chicago in 1953. In 1962, he became Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale, retiring as Sterling Professor of History in 1996. Afterward, he held chairs at Boston University and University of Pennsylvania.
President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was also a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1983, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him as Jefferson Lecturer, and in 2004, he received the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Pelikan wrote more than thirty books, including his five-volume The Christian Tradition (1971–1989). Other works include The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (1959), The Vindication of Tradition (1984), The Idea of the University (1992), Divine Rhetoric (2001), and Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution (2004).