[citation needed] 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.

His 1983 Jefferson Lecture, The Vindication of Tradition, included an often quoted one liner,[7] which he elaborated in a 1989 interview in U.S. News & World Report.

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.

[11] Pelikan gave the 1992–1993 Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen, which were published as the book Christianity and Classical Culture.

[citation needed] At the age of 80, he was appointed scholarly director for the "Institutions of Democracy Project" at the Annenberg Foundation.

[citation needed] 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.").

[14] 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.