This is On Being's Unheard Cut. I'm Christa Tippett. You're listening to my unedited conversation

with the late Great Historian Yaroslav Pelican. He devoted his life to exploring the modern

vitality of ancient Christian doctrines and creeds. He died in 2006, and this interview was from 2003.

We sat down together in the studios of KCMP in Northfield, Minnesota. Download the MP3 of the

Produced Show with Yaroslav Pelican at on being.org. I would say let's let's have an intelligent

conversation and not assume that they're dumb or that this is not part of their lives. But if you know

if I would assume that that Yale undergraduates are listening. Yeah. Undergraduates not not my

PhD students, not my colleagues in other parts of the world, but undergraduates who are alert,

interested, often woefully uninformed. Yes, right. May have very little grounding. That's right.

Let's say your Yale undergraduates and their parents and friends. Yeah. Or the victims of an

American education. We're in danger of going all over the map. So let's start. Let's just start

with some really basic questions. I have an MDiv from Yale. I remember being very surprised about

thinking about creeds differently through that, but it's been a few years. I think some of the

questions that came back to me that I think might be on listeners minds. Does every, do all

traditions have creeds, all Christian traditions? And how do they tend to be used? I mean let's say

as an Episcopalian, which I am now, they are used, they are part of the liturgy. But is that

how they are always used by different traditions? I don't think it is. And how are they

meant to be used by ordinary people? So that's a big place to start.

First of all, it is one of the differences between Christianity and the other major world

religions that Christianity has spawned many creeds as this set shows thousands of pages of

creeds. How many creeds are in have you collected? Well, we collected very nearly a thousand of

them and cut it down to, I forget what the final box score is on that. Somewhere around 200.

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