Category: Statistics

St. Alexander Hotovitzky on language in the Church

On November 4, 1905, a religious and literary journal entitled The Friend published a letter by St. Alexander Hotovitzky, dean of St. Nicholas Cathedral in New York. Hotovitzky wrote in response to an article in The Friend which claimed, "In this Russian service, of course, no one understood what was...

The Greeks in America, 1873

Editor's note: The following article appeared in the New York Times on August 4, 1873. That's nearly two decades before Greek immigrants began to flood into America. According to the book Race, Ethnicity, and Place in a Changing America, only 217 immigrants came from Greece to the US in the...

Historical Census Data for Orthodoxy in America

Last week, Alexei Krindatch released his landmark 2010 census of Orthodox churches in the United States. (Also last week, Krindatch was interviewed by Kevin Allen on Ancient Faith Radio. Click here to listen.) Sifting through the census data, I naturally got to thinking about historical censuses. Every ten years, from...

2010 Census of Orthodox Christian Churches in the USA

Over the past decade, my friend, the incomparable sociologist Alexei Krindatch, has developed a reputation for his remarkable studies of Orthodox Christianity in America. The full collection of his work is housed at www.orthodoxreality.org. Today, Alexei has released the results of his latest and most ambitious project yet -- a census of...

The most common names of American Orthodox clergy

Recently, I did a study of the most common names of American Orthodox parishes. In response, Christopher Orr commented, "I wonder what a similar study of clergy (bishop, priest, deacon) names would show. My guess would be Michael, John and George, and perhaps also Nicholas, with Alexander also very popular among...

Parish Names in American Orthodoxy

Here's a trivia question for you: What is the most common name for an Orthodox parish in the United States? This isn't really an historical question, and it's opening what is not strictly an historical article. But, to answer the question: the most common parish name is "St. Nicholas," followed...

American Orthodox demographics, 1906-1936

Every ten years, from 1906 to 1936, the US Census Bureau compiled a Census of Religious Bodies. These censuses are gold mines of information on early American Orthodoxy. Also, unlike so many of the inflated numbers that you're likely to see floating around, the census data is reliable. With its...

Language in American Orthodoxy, 1916 (reposted from 8/21/09)

To our New Calendar readers: Christ is born! The following article was originally published on August 21, 2009. If you're interested, you might check out the comments to that original posting. We'll be back with brand-new material on Monday, December 28. As you might expect, most American Orthodox parishes in...

The First Churches, State by State

There is an argument, made by many, that the first autocephalous Church to expand into a new territory "gets" that territory. I call it the flag-planting theory, because it reminds me of 15th century European explorers who reached the shores of undiscovered (for them) lands, stuck a flag in the...

Language in American Orthodoxy, 1916

As you might expect, most American Orthodox parishes in 1916 used foreign languages. From that year's Census of Religious Bodies, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, we find the following unsurprising information: Both of the Albanian parishes used exclusively Albanian. The four Bulgarian parishes used Bulgarian and Slavonic. The 87...