Tag: Greek

Fr. Arsenios Davis & communion with Episcopalians

Officially, of course, the Orthodox Church has never been in communion with the Protestant Episcopal Church. Yes, there's been some close dialogue over the years, and once upon a time even St. Raphael blessed his people to seek out Episcopal priests in extreme situations (though he soon rescinded that permission)....

Orthodoxy in Chicago, 1888-1892

Back in June, I did one of my first podcasts on an attempt, in 1888, to form a multiethnic parish in Chicago. Here are the basics: By 1888, there were about a thousand Orthodox Christians living in Chicago, most of them Greeks and Serbs / Montenegrins. A few years earlier, they had organized...

Abp Panteleimon & the Jerusalem Patriarchate in America

When most people think of the Jerusalem Patriarchate in America, they think of the controversial jursidiction that spung up in the past decade or so, which included ethnic Palestinians and some former clergy of Ss. Peter and Paul (Antiochian) in Ben Lomond, California. This jurisdiction received a bishop in 2002,...

The Lost Church of Baltimore

The 1890s witnessed the initial proliferation of Orthodox churches in the contiguous United States, and most of those early parishes are still with us today -- both Greek churches in New York City, the Greek and Russian churches in Chicago, St. Alexis Toth's parishes in Minneapolis and Wilkes-Barre. But one...

One city, two churches: New York, 1894

The first Greek Orthodox church in New York City -- named for the Holy Trinity -- was formed in January of 1892. It was organized by a group called the Society of Athena, which, as the name suggests, was composed mainly of Greek immigrants from Athens. The community's first priest, Fr. Paisios...

The First Greek Church in New York

From 1870 to 1883, Fr. Nicholas Bjerring operated a Russian chapel in New York City. At the time, there were very few Orthodox Christians in New York, and Bjerring's parish was always small. As we've discussed before, in 1883, the Russian government decided to pull its funding and close the...

The first convert priests… or… the first American apostates

On today's American Orthodox History podcast, I discuss the first two convert American Orthodox priests, James Chrystal and Nicholas Bjerring. You can listen to the podcast for the whole story, but I thought I'd give a brief summary here. Chrystal and Bjerring were exact contemporaries, both born in 1831. Chrystal...

Elder Joachim in America

In the 1920s, a young Greek priest named Fr. John Nicolaides served in America -- oddly enough, as a clergyman of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. In 1930, he left for Mount Athos, where he became Fr. Joachim, now well-known as Elder Joachim of St. Anne's Skete. He is prominently featured...

The Miracle of Prozimi

A couple weeks ago, I posted a 1927 article about a Greek priest in Connecticut who claimed to have made bread rise without the use of yeast. Instead, he used holy water, and this was apparently done in the context of a church service. I had never heard of such...

Robert Josias Morgan visits Russia, 1904

It's been a while since we talked about Robert Josias Morgan, the black Episcopal deacon who became an Orthodox priest in 1907, taking the name "Fr. Raphael." In the past, I've mentioned that, prior to his conversion to Orthodoxy, Morgan visited Russia in 1904. Upon his departure, he wrote a...