Tag: Statistics

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...

The stability of the Syrian Mission under St. Raphael

Back in June, I wrote a post on parish priest stability in the 1910s, and I found that the Syrians under St. Raphael had a higher clergy retention percentage than any other American Orthodox group. Way higher. Of the 14 Syrian parishes that had resident priests in 1911, 10 of...

“This Syrian Bishop derives his authority from… Antioch”

Matthew has previously provided for us some tidbits on the ambiguous canonical status of St. Raphael of Brooklyn (Antioch? Moscow? Both? How?)—see especially his post on St. Raphael's consecration as well as listening to the relevant parts in his "The Myth of Past Unity" lecture. Here's another data point that...

Two Columns from 2005

Readers may be interested to read the following two columns from 2005, written by Theophilus Eardwine and appearing on the OrthodoxyToday website. Both are notable in that they deny the commonly held notion that pre-1921 Orthodoxy in America was united under the Russian Archdiocese, something that in 2005 was unthinkable...

St. Tikhon, the Russian Council of 1917-18, and the Metropolia

The video takes a few minutes to get going, but here is a roughly 80-minute history of the Russian council of 1917-18, bracketed by history of the Russian Metropolia, entitled True Faith and the Ground of Liberty (subtitled St. Tikhon and the 1917-1918 Council: Architect and Blueprint for the Orthodox...

Parish priest stability, 1911-1915

I’ve conducted a little study on parish stability during the 1910s, with some slightly surprising results. I began with a list of the Orthodox parishes that had resident priests in 1911. For each of these, I checked to see whether the same priest was serving the parish four years later,...