Month: December 2009
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Early priests in New Orleans
Holy Trinity Church in New Orleans was the first organized Orthodox parish in the contiguous United States. Despite that fact, precious little is known about its early history. The first priest to visit New Orleans was the infamous Fr. Agapius Honcharenko, but, contrary to popular belief, Honcharenko was not actually the parish priest. He was…
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Antebellum Southerners on Orthodoxy
The following is an excerpt from a post Copyright © 2009 by Tyson (Silouan) Smith, originally posted February 12, 2009, and used here by permission. Read the original here. For the most part, the attitudes we find towards the Orthodox Church, typically referred to as the “Greek Church” among southerners, were either negative or ambivalent.…
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The Sorcerer on the Golden Horn
The following is a translation from the French of the article “Un Conquete du Patriarcat Oecumenique,” from Échos d’Orient, Volume 11, 1908, concerning Fr. Raphael (Robert Josias) Morgan, the first black Orthodox priest in America. The article uses his middle name “Josias.” The translation was done using Google Translate with a little cleaning afterward. A…
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When to sit and when to stand
Last week, I spent about 2,000 words discussing the question of pews in early Greek churches in America. Based on my findings to date, it seems that pews became popular in Greek churches sometime in the 1920s, for reasons that aren’t yet clear. In Paul Manolis’ indispensible History of the Greek Church of America in…
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Passing Judgment on the Past
This week, I’ve written about two topics that can be somewhat divisive: clergy dress, and pews. From the feedback I’ve been getting, it seems that some people want me to come down on one side or the other. Should priests wear cassocks everywhere? Should they wear collars? Should our churches have pews, or shouldn’t they?…
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Pews (or lack thereof) in early Orthodox churches
Yesterday, I introduced one of my ongoing research projects, a study of the origins of pews in American Orthodox churches. Oh, I’m famililar with the old story — that early Orthodox parishes bought old Protestant churches and retained the inherited pews — but whenever I hear that story, it seems to be just a bald…
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Built or Bought? Greek church buildings in the 1910s
Pews are a common sight in American Orthodox churches, especially those in the Greek and Antiochian Archdioceses. I remember, as an adolescent in an Antiochian parish, learning that my fellow Orthodox in Greece or Russia or Lebanon don’t have pews in their churches. When I asked why we had pews and the rest of Orthodoxy…