It’s the end of another year, and I thought I’d do what so many others are doing, and take a look back at the year that has passed. But I won’t be revisiting all the significant events that took place in 2009; rather, I want to consider the progress of American Orthodox historical studies in the past year.

Early this year, the “myth of unity” was still widely believed. It was pretty common to hear church leaders make the claim that all Orthodox Christians in America were united under the Russian Archdiocese until 1917 or 1921. Now, though, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone saying that. Most everyone seems to generally acknowledge the reality that the Russian Archdiocese did not, in fact, include every American Orthodox Christian. That claim has been replaced by another: that everyone should have been in the Russian Archdiocese — that the Russian Archdiocese was the rightful, canonical authority in America, regardless of whether everyone recognized it at the time.

This shift, from “what was” to “what should have been,” has accompanied a greater reliance on evidence. There seems to have been a general realization that we can no longer simply make bald statements, not based on facts. People still make claims for their favorite jurisdictions, but those claims seem to be more grounded in evidence than they were a year ago. The more we can get away from cherry-picking our facts, or ignoring evidence altogether, the better off we’ll be.

It has been a year of transition in other respects, as well. This year witnessed the retirement of Fr. John Erickson, the longtime church history professor at St. Vladimir’s Seminary, and arguably the leading authority on American Orthodox history. (Although Fr. John has by no means disappeared, and we hope to see even more of his work now that he is no longer in the classroom.) Also in 2009, our own executive director, Fr. Oliver Herbel, was awarded a PhD in Historical Theology from Saint Louis University. I point this out not only because of Fr. Oliver’s position with SOCHA, but also because he is one of only a handful of academics with an expertise in American Orthodox history.

This year, of course, saw the arrival of SOCHA, our website, and my own podcast on Ancient Faith Radio. The summer’s conference at St. Vladimir’s Seminary paid considerable attention to the question of our history in America. The pan-Orthodox mandate of regional Episcopal Assemblies has also led to a heightened interest in our history — it seems that forward-thinking developments often inspire a reevaluation of the past. That reevaluation is made all the more exciting by new discoveries, such as story of Orthodoxy in colonial Virginia.

In many respects, 2009 has been a year of great tumult and change in American Orthodoxy in general. In terms of our historical thinking, I daresay there has never been a year quite like 2009. I cannot possibly convey my amazement at the sheer numbers of people who want to learn about American Orthodox history. When we started this website, we expected a few dozen, or perhaps a hundred people to follow our work. Instead, it has been thousands.

On behalf of everyone here at SOCHA, I’d like to thank all of you for reading and listening and commenting. We’ve got some big plans for 2010, so stay tuned.

After thinking and praying about my column, Frontier Orthodoxy, and discussing it with Fr. Andrew and Matthew, I have come to realize that it might best be fulfilled as its own blog.  This surprised me as I never thought I was the blogging type.  It also surprised me because I really like what we’re doing here on SOCHA and figured I’d not do much more online beyond this.  Recently, though, I have noticed that the direction I wish to take Frontier Orthodoxy is not necessarily the same direction SOCHA desires to go.  SOCHA has a narrower focus than I intend for Frontier Orthodoxy (both historically and otherwise) and so, Frontier Orthodoxy demands its own site.  I am not leaving SOCHA entirely.  I am only moving Frontier Orthodoxy to a new location: http://frontierorthodoxy.wordpress.com.  I will still be around and might even post on SOCHA every once in a while.  Primarily, though, I am leaving the SOCHA blogging to Fr. Andrew and Matthew, as it had been.  They have established a particular kind of trajectory that may be best maintained without Frontier Orthodoxy interjected within.  I do, however, still intend to develop the academic component of SOCHA and to work toward establishing a print journal this coming year (2010).

In the meantime (and beyond) I hope each of you who has found Frontier Orthodoxy worthwhile will continue to read it at its new location.

I happened to pick up an old favorite off the bookshelf recently — E.H. Carr’s classic What Is History?, published in 1961. It’s a wonderful little book about the method of history; if you majored in history in college, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it. It’s not quite Robin Collingwood, but it’s pretty darned close.

Anyway, I ran across this passage, which I’d dog-eared years ago. It had always resonated with me, but, having now presented my unfinished wanderings to the general public over these past five months, it means more to me now than ever.

Laymen — that is to say, non-academic friends or friends from other academic disciplines — sometimes ask me how the historian goes to work when he writes history. The commonest assumption appears to be that the historian divides his work into two sharply distinguishable phases or periods. First, he spends a long preliminary period reading his sources and filling his notebooks with facts: then, when this is over, he puts away his sources, takes out his notebooks, and writes his book from beginning to end.

This is to me an unconvincing and unplausible picture. For myself, as soon as I have got going on a few of what I take to be the capital sources, the itch becomes too strong and I begin to write — not necessarily at the beginning, but somewhere, anywhere. Thereafter, reading and writing go on simultaneously. The writing is added to, subtracted from, re-shaped, cancelled, as I go on reading. The reading is guided and directed and made fruitful by the writing: the more I write, the more I know what I am looking for, the better I understand the significance and relevance of what I find. [...]

I am convinced that, for any historian worth the name, the two processes of what economists call “input” and “output” go on simultaneously and are, in practice, parts of a single process. If you try to separate them, or to give one priority over the other, you fall into one of two heresies. Either you write scissors-and-paste history without meaning or significance; or you write propaganda or historical fiction, and merely use facts of the past to embroider a kind of writing which has nothing to do with history.

Before I started writing almost daily here at OrthodoxHistory.org, I kept copious notes of my research findings. I drafted and re-drafted dozens of articles — some long, some short, but none for immediate publication. I wrote, with myself as my only audience, because I could not resist the urge to write. And as Carr said, the act of writing fueled the act of researching, and led me to grapple with the evidence and better understand it in the process.

Now that I write for public consumption, that process has only intensified. I still keep private notes (hundreds of pages’ worth, by now), but I also put a lot of my unfinished work here at OH.org. I have been pleasantly surprised to find so many people who are also interested in American Orthodox history, and many of you have turned the tables, writing to me and, in the process, teaching me and forcing me to look at my own research in a fresh light. The whole experience has been extremely gratifying.

So, in this season of Thanksgiving here in the United States, I would like to thank each of you who read what we write here at OrthodoxHistory.org, be it on the website itself, on Facebook, on Google Reader, or via some other means. I am humbled that you would take the time to read our work, and I am very happy to know that there are thousands of you out there who care about this subject. I know I speak for all of us here at SOCHA when I say: Thank you.

I thought I’d let all the readers of this website know that I’ve launched a bit of a miniseries on my Ancient Faith Radio podcast. For the next five or six episodes, I’ll be interviewing experts (and SOCHA members) Fr. John Erickson, Fr. Andrew Damick, and Fr. Oliver Herbel. In each interview, we’ll be talking about a different historical attempt at American Orthodox administrative unity. The first episode, which went live late this afternoon, is Part 1 of an interview with Fr. John on the subject of the Russian Mission in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Here’s the plan for the miniseries:

• Fr. John Erickson on the Russian Mission (1890s-1910s) (2 parts)
• Fr. Andrew Damick on Abp Aftimios Ofiesh’s American Orthodox Catholic Church (1920s/1930s)
• Fr. Oliver Herbel on the Federated Greek Orthodox Catholic Primary Jurisdictions in America (1940s)
• Fr. John Erickson on SCOBA (1960s-present)
• Fr. John Erickson on the OCA (1970-present)

Every single one of those efforts tried, in different ways and with different specific goals, to bring together Orthodox Americans of various ethnic backgrounds. And while each of those groups accomplished some significant things, none of them has resulted in a single, unified, canonically-regular American Orthodox Church. In unpacking their stories, we will, in part, be unpacking the story of American Orthodoxy. By the end, I hope we’ll all (myself included) have a much fuller understanding of just how we got where we are today.

All of this, of course, is done with a present elephant in the room — IV Chambesy, and the upcoming first meeting of the North American Episcopal Assembly in late May 2010. Can Chambesy succeed where others have failed? And how exactly is Chambesy any different than these past efforts? By the end of this miniseries, I hope we’ll all have a better understanding of all that.

Interested parties may be interested(!) in taking a look at this essay by Richard Barrett: American Orthodox Christian Historiography: The Methodological Problem.

We’ve made three major additions to the OrthodoxHistory.org website in the past few days that you might like to take a look at: Administration (just what it says: listing our Advisory and Executive Boards), Terms of Use (standard for many websites; please read and abide by them), and Resources (all sorts of goodies; this part will probably grow the most over time).

All three are subject to further revision and additions, so check in and take a look every so often.

Those of us who are doing the tinkering on the machinery of the newly founded SOCHA have been astounded by the outpouring of attention that our site has received. From the stats, we’re getting around 200 views per day on the site, and we now have more than 500 fans following us on Facebook (from less than 10 three weeks ago). There clearly seems to be a building interest in the subjects that are being covered here.

I believe it’s thus important for us to comment every so often on why it is we’re doing this work. I can’t speak directly for the other members of the Executive Board, but we’ve spoken about this, and I think they’re of similar minds. (You can listen to Matthew talk about why he thinks this subject is important on his inaugural podcast from May 5.)

As for myself, I got interested in the subject of American Orthodox history most particularly while I was in seminary. Initially, I started looking into our common history because while in seminary I ran (for the first time in my Orthodox life) headlong into some rather shrill jurisdictional agendas, most of them being based on historical claims. Though I had never really bothered much with such things in parish life prior to seminary, I found it all strangely compelling. At first, this is what I spent most of my historical reading time on, trying to determine whether the claims really had any merit. Over time, though, I started running into stories that I found a lot more interesting than the claims about who was “here first” or whatnot. (I also came to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter who was here first, both because that wouldn’t help us now and also because the canonical tradition actually doesn’t support ecclesiastical flag-planting.)

Some of the stories seemed mainly irrelevant to the issues of jurisdiction, claims, etc., such as the queer tale of Archbishop Aftimios Ofiesh (regarding whom I did my M.Div. thesis). But what tied many of them together, if only in a certain culturally thematic way, is the question of unity.

I believe I speak for all the core members of SOCHA when I say that we want unity of every sort in Orthodox America. (That’s not a party line, though, mind you. It just happens to be what all of us want.) So that leads us to the question of why we decided to form the Society and why we took the step of making this website our first major project together.

I believe our true motivation comes down to the sheer joy of the narrative. There is something ugly about subjecting a narrative to an agenda, and it distorts not only the historical record itself but also the humanity and humaneness which are inherent in all stories about God’s sons and daughters. Ideology is not the same as theology or history. The latter two are much more akin to each other than either are to the former. In all true theology, we have a narrative into which we find ourselves initiated. The Gospel itself takes the form of a story. Thus, history is something like the Gospel and may well communicate the Gospel. And we know that History, when revealed in the eschaton in all its grandness and glory, will indeed reveal the Gospel. We will have found that all human history was really the Gospel all along.

Thus, we study history and try to learn the stories of our forebears in the faith, not merely so we can “learn from” the past, but so we can enter into the story itself. American Orthodox Christian history is really far more fascinating, varied and diverse than any of the jurisdictional ideologues prefer to admit, because it impinges upon their systems. Nothing can be admitted into those hermetically sealed thought systems except what feeds the ideology.

But as we sift through the letters, newspaper clippings, photographs, documents, oral histories, and so on which constitute the archaeological flotsam and jetsam of the historian, we discover something so much more wonderful than a “rightful” claim to jurisdiction. There is even a greatness and dignity that we can see in people only after they are departed from this life. In all that historical matter we may actually see Christ, because a true engagement with sources without any ideology demanding their service always yields things that are far more surprising and delightful. In the end, it’s mankind we see, and through him, often quite unexpectedly, we also see his Creator.

So, that’s why I love American Orthodox history.

The Society now has a “page” on Facebook, adding another outlet to keep folks connected with this site and what’s going on in the study of American Orthodox history: Check it out here.