Matthew Namee

Matthew Namee serves as editor of OrthodoxHistory.org. He specializes in the history of Orthodoxy in America from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. He's written a lot about church history, both at this website and elsewhere, and he's spoken at numerous conferences and events. Matthew is the former research assistant to Bill James, the legendary baseball author and Boston Red Sox executive. He went on to earn a J.D. from the University of Kansas and serves as General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer for Orthodox Ministry Services. He and his wife Catherine and their children attend Holy Apostles Orthodox Church in Vancouver, WA. Matthew can be contacted at mfnamee [at] gmail [dot] com.

mfnamee@gmail.com

Jordanville to host conference on St. Sergius of Radonezh

One of our SOCHA advisory board members is Deacon Andrei Psarev, church history instructor at Holy Trinity Seminary in Jordanville, NY. He's asked us to help spread the word about a conference being held at Jordanville on October 10 and 11 to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the birth of St....

Orthodox bishops in 1859

I ran across this the other day -- in 1859, there were 278 Orthodox bishops in the world: Church Bishops Constantinople (including Romania, Bulgaria, and part of Serbia) 136 Russia (including Georgia) 65 Greece 24 Antioch 17 Jerusalem 14 Austria (now Serbia, mostly) 11 Alexandria 5 Cyprus 4 Mount Sinai 1...

Today in American Orthodox History: May 13

On May 13, 1888, a diverse group of Orthodox men, mostly from Greece and the Balkans, met in Chicago to discuss the formation of a multiethnic Orthodox parish. That meeting was the topic of one of the very first posts on this blog, back in 2009. And also one of...

New document on life of Fr. Nicola Yanney

Fr. Nicola Yanney is one of my favorite priests in the history of Orthodoxy in America. He immigrated to America at age 19, in 1892-93, with his new wife. They immediately settled in, of all places, Nebraska. Nine years later, she gave birth to their fifth child -- and died...

Amazing photo collage of Antiochian priests, circa 1920

First of all, I'm really sorry for my extended absence from this website. Beginning in December, my life went pretty crazy -- first the end of law school, then studying for the bar exam, and then moving and starting my legal career. Unfortunately, I've had no time at all for...

A Snapshot of Interwar Orthodoxy: The Ecumenical Patriarchate

Yesterday, we began publishing a series of excerpts from Matthew Spinka's 1935 article on worldwide Orthodoxy in the years following World War I, originally published in the journal Church History.Spinka's article is a succinct and quite balanced summary of the state of affairs in global Orthodoxy in a very chaotic period....

A Snapshot of Interwar Orthodoxy: Introduction

In the June 1935 issue of the journal Church History, Matthew Spinka of the Chicago Theological Seminary published a 20-page article entitled, "Post-War Eastern Orthodox Churches." The "War" he was referring to was, of course, World War I, and his article offers a succinct and quite balanced snapshot of the...

Early stages of the Bulgarian schism from Constantinople

We just finished running a series of six articles on the 1872 Council of Constantinople, published contemporaneously in the Methodist Quarterly Review. The following article is from about a decade earlier, and describes the early stages of the Bulgarian split from the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This piece is from an...

The “Bulgarian Question” and the 1872 Council of Constantinople, Part 6

This is the final Methodist Quarterly Review article dealing with the aftermath of the 1872 Council of Constantinople. From the Methodist Quarterly Review, April 1874.   The Bulgarian Church question has, on the whole, attracted less attention during the year 1873 than in the previous years. The Bulgarians, undoubtedly, have...