Category: Westernization

Prayers for the President: an addendum

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article detailing some of the history of prayers for the US President in American Orthodox churches. After I published it, a reader named Andy Romanofsky sent along this excerpt from Chapter 1 of Archbishop Gregory Afonsky's A History of the Orthodox Church in America: 1917-1939: The...

Prayers for the President

Attend an American Orthodox parish today, of any jurisdiciton, and you're likely to hear prayers offered for the President of the United States (and, in some parishes, for the other branches of government as well). The first evidence I've been able to find of such prayers is from the journal...

Editorial: The New Americanism, Orthodox History and Unity in America

In the closing years of the 19th century, a number of Roman Catholic leaders in America were accused of a heresy called Americanism, and Pope Leo XIII wrote an apostolic letter specifically denouncing elements of this teaching, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae. Americanism was essentially the emphasis on American political values over...

Fr. Ingram Nathaniel Irvine on ecumenism in 1907

Recently, I happened to revisit an essay by Fr. Ingram Nathaniel Irvine, published in St. Raphael's Al Kalimat (The Word) magazine. I don't have the precise date, but I think it was written in 1907. The whole article is on the subject of "Church Unity" -- what, today, we would call "ecumenism."...

Icons Are Not “Written”

Editor's note: Today, we are pleased to present an article by Dr. John Yiannias, Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Virginia. Dr. Yiannias holds a Ph.D. in Early Christian and Byzantine Art from the University of Pittsburgh, and is a leading expert on Orthodox iconography. At the 2008 conference...

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...

A Poisoned Chalice? Fr. Ingram Nathaniel Irvine in 1920

As we've discussed previously, in July of 1920, an all-convert, all-English Orthodox parish was founded in New York City. Called the Church of the Transfiguration, the parish was led by the newly-converted Fr. Patrick Mythen. But it was the fulfillment of a long-held dream of the elderly Fr. Ingram Nathaniel...

The First English-Speaking Parish

For a while now, I have been meaning to write about the first all-English Orthodox parish in America, founded in New York City in 1920. Today, I'm going to give a brief introduction to that parish, and the main characters involved. This is hardly the whole story; it really is...

Protestant hymns in Orthodox churches

I've been looking through a borrowed copy of Fr. Michael Gelsinger's Orthodox Hymns in English, published by the Antiochian Archdiocese in 1939. This is a significant work, and Gelsinger's hymns are still used to this day. I'll write more about this book in the future, but I found the following...