Pelikan, Poledouris, and Friedman

With the passing of 2006 some three weeks ago, I wanted to post a remembrance of three men who passed away in 2006. All were at the top of their fields and will be greatly missed by many:

Jaroslav Pelikan, 7 Dec 1923 – 13 May 2006. Pelikan received his PhD at 22 and spent four decades as a Professor at Yale. His five-volume magnus opus, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, was one of the greatest scholarly enterprises of the last century. I also highly recommend Jesus through the Centuries, Mary through the Centuries, and Whose Bible is it? Although a Lutheran for most of his life, returning to his eastern roots Pelikan joined the Orthodox Church in 1998, stating he "returned to it, peeling back the layers of my own belief to reveal the Orthodoxy that was always there." His deep knowledge of Christian doctrine, second to none, and his ultimate adoption of Orthodoxy make Pelikan an invaluable source of ‘unbiased’ information for many of the doctrinal issues I’ve pondered over the years. I am currently reading one of his last books, The Bible and the Constitution. An interview with him concerning publication of his introduction to Christian Creeds is available here and a video lecture concerning Christianity and Islam is available here.

Basil Poledouris, 21 Aug, 1945 - 8 Nov, 2006. Powerful and intricate, his movie scores are among the best ever composed. The score for Conan the Barbarian is my favorite of all time. Using very little dialogue throughout the film, director John Milius relied mostly upon the emotional content of Poledouris’ score to draw the viewer into the story.

Milton Friedman, 31 July, 1912 – 16 Nov, 2006. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976, Milton is the man most responsible for rescuing the world from Keynesian economics. The Economist called him “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it" and Alan Greenspan stated “There are very few people over the generations who have ideas that are sufficiently original to materially alter the direction of civilization. Milton is one of those very few people.” His ideas on Capitalism and free markets guided by minimal governmental interference are a bright light for the future freedom of economic man.