Category: Orthodoxy in the Americas

Nicholas Chapman: Was Fr. Samuel Domien a Greek Catholic? Part 3

Editor's note: What follows is the last of three articles by Nicholas Chapman on Fr. Samuel Domien, the first Orthodox priest known to have set foot in the Western Hemisphere. Domien was fascinated with electricity and became friends with Benjamin Franklin, who mentions Domien in his letters. To read Nicholas'...

This week in American Orthodox history (June 4-10)

June 10, 1870: The Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church created the Diocese of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska. Previously, Alaska -- or, before its 1867 sale to the United States, "Russian America" -- was part of the Diocese of Kamchatka. Making Alaska its own diocese was part of...

Nicholas Chapman: Was Fr. Samuel Domien a Greek Catholic? Part 2

Editor's note: What follows is the second of three articles by Nicholas Chapman on Fr. Samuel Domien, the first Orthodox priest known to have set foot in the Western Hemisphere. Domien was fascinated with electricity and became friends with Benjamin Franklin, who mentions Domien in his letters. To read Nicholas'...

This week in American Orthodox history (May 28-June 3)

This week's article is embarrassingly short -- so short that I don't think it actually qualifies as an "article." I've just been pulled in all directions lately, and haven't been able to give this site the time I'd like. We've got several fascinating article in the pipeline, though, including pieces...

Nicholas Chapman: Was Fr. Samuel Domien a Greek Catholic? Part 1

Editor's note: What follows is the first of three articles by Nicholas Chapman on Fr. Samuel Domien, the first Orthodox priest known to have set foot in the Western Hemisphere. Domien was fascinated with electricity and became friends with Benjamin Franklin, who mentions Domien in his letters. To read Nicholas'...

Film on Yup’ik Orthodox of Alaska in development

A young filmmaker, Dmitry Trakovsky, is working on a really exciting project: a documentary on the Orthodox Yup'ik people of Alaska. Here's how Trakovsky describes the film on his fundraising page at Kickstarter.com: This feature-length documentary embarks on a voyage down the murky waters of the Kuskokwim and Yukon Rivers...

This week in American Orthodox history (May 21-27)

May 21, 1851: Michael Ziorov -- the future Bishop Nicholas, head of the Russian Mission in North America -- was born in the District of Kherson, in what was then the Russian Empire and what is today Ukraine. As a layman, he served as Inspector for two seminaries. At 36,...

Met. Leonty: A Life in Moments

As Matthew pointed out in his post yesterday, this week marks the 47th anniversary of the death of one of the truly  great Orthodox churchmen of the 20th century, Metropolitan Leonty Turkevich.  With an ecclesiastical career in the United States spanning from 1906 to 1965, there are few figures in the...

This week in American Orthodox history (May 14-20)

May 17, 1870: The newly ordained convert priest Fr. Nicholas Bjerring celebrated his first Divine Liturgy in St. Petersburg, Russia. He didn't know Church Slavonic, so he served in German. May 19, 1884: Archimandrite Stephen Hatherly, a convert priest from England, arrived in Philadelphia. I wrote about Hatherly's visit almost...

Fr. Kyrill Johnson, 1897-1947

A lot of us at SOCHA happen to be really busy right now (personally, I'm in the middle of law school exams), so rather than leave you without much to read this week, here's an article we originally published back in August 2010. Fr. Kyrill Johnson was one of many...