Jaroslav Pelikan - Lutheran Pastor To Orthodox Layman

Lutheran Pastor To Orthodox Layman

For most of his life Pelikan was a Lutheran and was an ordained pastor in that tradition. In 1998, however, he and his wife Sylvia were received into the Orthodox Church in America in St Vladimir's Seminary Chapel. 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."

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.