Category: Orthodoxy in the Americas

New book on Wichita’s Lebanese Heritage

Recently, I coauthored Wichita's Lebanese Heritage, a new book from Arcadia Publishing. Smack-dab in the middle of the Great Plains, Wichita, Kansas is an unlikely center for Orthodoxy. But it's a pretty remarkable place, with a resident Antiochian bishop, the greatest Orthodox-owned bookstore in America, and thousands of Orthodox Christians....

Source of the week: 1907 review of Hapgood Service Book

On today's episode of our American Orthodox History podcast, I discuss Isabel Hapgood, an Episcopalian woman who had a significant impact on American Orthodox history. She is most famous today for her landmark English translation of the Orthodox Service Book. Her translation was first published in 1906, and remains in...

“The Stormy Petrel of the Cloth”

We've spent a lot of time on this website talking about Fr. Raphael Morgan, the first black Orthodox priest in America. Morgan was attached to the Greek church in Philadelphia. When he went to the Ecumenical Patriarchate to be ordained in 1907, he had two letters in his possession. One...

Fr. Raphael Morgan against Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey was a widely influential black nationalist from Jamaica. He promoted black pride and championed the "back to Africa" movement. In 1916, when he was just 29 years old and at the outset of his public career, he visited the United States and embarked on a 38-state speaking tour. Not...

Serbs in Chicago

I've recently stumbled onto a really interesting article on the history of Chicago's Serbian community. This paper, written by Krinka Vidaković Petrov, was published in the journal Serbian Studies in 2006. It helps shed further light on the early history of Orthodoxy in Chicago, which we've discussed many times on...

Irvine on St. Patrick’s Day, 1916

Fr. Ingram Nathaniel Irvine has probably had more of his letters published in the New York Times than any other Orthodox clergyman. Just in the period from 1907-1918, the Times published no fewer than six Irvine letters. One of them appeared in their March 17, 1916 issue -- that is, exactly...

Metropolitan Antony Bashir podcast

My latest podcast is up at AFR. I discuss the life of Metropolitan Antony Bashir, basically repeating what I wrote a month ago, on the anniversary of his death.

The Reversal of St. Raphael

Last week, we discussed St. Raphael's involvement with the Episcopal Church -- his role in an Orthodox-Anglican dialogue group, and his June 1910 letter permitting Episcopalian clergy to minister to Syrian Orthodox people in limited circumstances. Later that year, one of St. Raphael's top assistants, Fr. Ingram Nathaniel Irvine, wrote...

St. Raphael and the Episcopalians in 1910

At the turn of the last century, relations between the Orthodox and Anglican Churches were quite warm. They cooled a bit in 1905, when St. Tikhon ordained the former Episcopal priest Ingram Nathaniel Irvine to the Orthodox priesthood, but even so, many on both sides of the dialogue felt that...

A Greek bishop in America in 1893 (Part 2)

Last week, I introduced Archbishop Dionysius Latas of Zante, a Greek hierarch who visited America in 1893. When we left his story, he had arrived in New York City and was en route to Saratoga Springs, where the Episcopalian Bishop Henry Potter had invited him. We'll pick up the story...