November 29, 2004
Library of Congress Announces Winners of John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced today the award of the second John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences to Jaroslav Pelikan of New Haven, Conn., and Paul Ricoeur of Paris, France. Billington will present the shared award at a formal ceremony at the Library of Congress at Dec. 8, in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C.
The Kluge Prize of 1 million dollars is given for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences - areas of scholarship for which there are no Nobel Prizes. These disciplines include anthropology, criticism in the arts and literature, history, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion and sociology. Nominators for the prize were asked to recommend preeminent scholars in any of these or other closely related fields whose work was recognized as outstanding by their peers.
In announcing the award, Billington said: "Jaroslav Pelikan is an historian who deals with the whole of the Christian tradition from the ancient Near East to the present. He began his deep scholarship on Luther, having been brought up in a Lutheran household, and he has moved over time to consider the whole history of church doctrine, both through the Western Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. He is concerned with the history and practice of worship in its doctrinal and creedal forms over two millennia."
"Paul Ricoeur is a philosopher who draws on the entire tradition of western philosophy to explore and explain common problems: What is a self? How is memory used and abused? What is the nature of responsibility? He is a constant questioner - always pressing to understand the nature and limits of what constitutes our humanity."
Jaroslav Pelikan and Paul Ricoeur, two scholars of enormous and wide-ranging accomplishment, will divide between them the second John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the study of humanity. Ricoeur insists on the centrality of interpretation for humanistic learning; he has rehabilitated the Western humanistic tradition as an interconnected fabric of meaning. Pelikan has drawn together and commented upon two millennia of documents concerning the doctrines and the practice of Christian worship, from the early Middle East through European and American Catholicism and Protestantism to the Orthodoxy of churches of the East.
These two scholars, one an historian, the other a philosopher, demonstrate the rich and complex legacies of humanistic learning and the unremitting effort required to master these resources and make them available to contemporary readers.
Ricoeur's journey of interrogation through a wide variety of contemporary thought and Pelikan's journey through diverse linguistic frameworks and religious traditions represent the lifetime of achievement in the study of humanity that the Kluge Prize seeks to honor.
Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world's best thinkers to distill wisdom from the Library's rich resources and to stimulate and energize interaction with policymakers in Washington. The Kluge Center houses five senior Kluge Chairs, other senior-level chairs and nearly 25 postdoctoral fellows. For more information about any of the fellowships and programs offered by the center, visit its Web site at www.loc.gov/kluge/.
