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GEORGIA BULLETIN, THURSDAY, MAY 30,1968 7
\Now Generation 9 Suffers From Amnesia
Washington, D.C. (RNS)—A
noted Lutheran theologian
charged here that the “now
generation” suffers from a bad
case of historical amnesia which
could prove fatal to its
revolutionary cause.
Dr. Jaroslav Pelikan told
members of the Religious
Publishers Group, which met here
during the American Book
Publishers Council meeting, that
young people “have lost touch
with any tradition more than one
generation old.”
“Every 16-year-old girl,” he
said, “wears her clothes as though
she had invented sex, when her
very presence suggests that
someone must have thought of it
before.”
“THEOLOGICAL students,”
he observed, “suppose that they
have to read each new proof that
the doctrine of the Trinity does
not make sense to modern man,
even though they have never read
Athanasius of Augustine on the
Trinity.”
“Amnesia,” he warned,
“involves not only the loss of
memory about others, but
especially the loss of identity.”
Historical amnesia he said, can
cripple the self.
Dr. Pelikan, a Lutheran
Church-Mi ssouri Synod
theologian, is Titus Street
Professor of Ecclesiastical History
at Yale Divinity School.
For the first three centuries,
he said* “The Christian church
found it had to embrace the
gentiles, yet could not sever its
ties to Israel, and therefore it
became catholic by
simultaneously declaring its
universality of outreach and
affirming its continuity with the
ancient people of God.”
“AS A theologian and a
Christian,” he said, “I confess my
faith in a church that must be
one, holy, catholic, and apostolic;
so also, as a humanist and a
scholar, I commit myself to a life
of the mind that is truly
catholic.”
“For this catholic vision,
which counteracts cultural
myopia, and this catholic
memory which combats historical
amnesia, nothing can replace the
right kind of book,” he told the
publishers.
He described “cultural
myopia” as the “indifference to
those foreign cultures with which
American life has not had a
historic connection.”
“If American short-sighted
ness is cured at all,” he observed,
“it is usually cured in only one
eye, that which looks across the
Atlantic, more precisely - across
the North Atlantic.”
“PIONEERING Programs in
Asian and African cultures have
been doing much to correct this
condition,” Dr. Pelikan said, “but
the pressure of events both here
and abroad has been increasing so
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much more rapidly than our
programs of teaching and
publishing that the diseases seems
in many ways to be getting
worse.”
“There is only one remedy,”
he stated, “to which the
responsibility of curing cultural
myopia can finally be assigned,
and that is the book.”
‘‘In spite of the
weU-publieized campaign against
the dominance of the printed
page,” he claimed, “no other
medium is adequate to this
assignment.
“I REMAIN to be
convinced that the jet-propelled
tourist of this - century learns
more about other cultures than
did the bookworm of the 19th
Century.”
“A good picture may be
worth a thousand words,” he
observed, “but a good book is
worth a thousand pictures.”
Dr. Pelikan told his-audience,
“It is quite possible Boris
Pasternack has done .more to help
make post-revolutionary Russia
live in' the minds of Americans
than have all the other media --
and their message.”
Originally the publishers
group was to have been addressed
by the Rev. William Sloane
Coffin, Protestant chaplain of
Yale University, Dr. Pelikan
substituted for Coffin who is now
being tried in Boston on charges
of having conspired to counsel
young men to violate Selective
Service laws.
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