Tag: Tikhon Belavin

Moscow v. the Metropolia, part 4: initial impressions

To read my previous articles on the 1952 Supreme Court case Kedroff v. St. Nicholas Cathedral, click here. For the full text of the Supreme Court opinions, click here. In my last four articles, I summarized the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions in Kedroff v. St. Nicholas Cathedral. Here, I will...

An interview with Patriarch Tikhon in 1923

  Editor's note: The interview that follows originally appeared in a book published by the YMCA in Prague. I found it on the fascinating Alexander Palace Time Machine website (the original is here). Many thanks to Jenny Mosher, who posted a link to this interview on our SOCHA Facebook page....

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...

The Historical Reality of Greek Orthodoxy in America

Last week, I was privileged to speak at the Greek Archdiocese Clergy-Laity Congress in Atlanta. I gave the same talk on two days, July 5 and 6. Below, we've published the text of my lecture. A couple of things, up front: first, I didn't include footnotes, because this was just...

St. Tikhon: address to a newly-married couple

Editor's note: The following homily, by St. Tikhon, was published in the March 1902 English supplement to the Russian Orthodox American Messenger, the official periodical of the Russian Diocese. From the reference to St. Macarios the Great, we can date this homily rather precisely. The feast of St. Macarios is...

The Russian Diocese in the <i>San Francisco Call</i>, 1900

Editor's note: On April 22, 1900, the San Francisco Call published a full-page spread on Orthodoxy in America. The author, Sarah Comstock, visited San Francisco's Holy Trinity Cathedral and interviewed the cathedral dean, Fr. Sebastian Dabovich. The resulting article (below) was accompanied by several photos, some of which I have reproduced...

Rethinking the Myth of Unity

One year ago, I delivered a paper at St. Vladimir's Seminary entitled, "The Myth of Unity and the Origins of Jurisdictional Pluralism in American Orthodoxy." (Click here for the audio.) My thesis was that, contrary to a widely-held belief, American Orthodoxy was not administratively united prior to the Bolshevik Revolution of...

Our Best Chance Yet: an historical reflection on administrative unity

We've tried this before. Over the past century or so, there have been no fewer than five attempts to bring the various ethnic Orthodox jurisdictions in America into some measure of administrative unity. Next week, from May 26-28, we embark upon a sixth effort -- an effort which, compared to its predecessors,...

A Greek church in San Francisco, 1903

  From its founding in 1868, the Russian cathedral in San Francisco was a multiethnic community. In particular, Greeks and Serbs were an integral part of the church, and, at various times, there was an ethnic Greek (Fr. Kallinikos Kanellas) and an ethnic Serb priest (Fr. Sebastian Dabovich) serving the...

Today in history: St. Tikhon on the Sunday of Orthodoxy

St. Tikhon delivered the following address on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, February 23, 1903, in San Francisco. It was reprinted in Holy Trinity Cathedral LIFE (the newsletter of the San Francisco OCA cathedral) in March 1995, and may be found in the fantastic Holy Trinity Cathedral online archives. We are...