Author: Matthew Namee
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P.T. Barnum’s widow married in NY Greek church
P.T. Barnum was the greatest showman of the 19th century. Today, he’s most closely associated with the circus that bears his name, but in his own day, he was much more than a circus organizer. In an era before blockbuster movies, Barnum was the closest you could get to a larger-than-life Hollywood producer. He was…
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Fr. Kyrill Johnson: Review of a Protestant translation of the Divine Liturgy
Editor’s note: Yesterday, we introduced Fr. Kyrill Johnson (1897-1947), a 1920s convert who spent most of his career in the Antiochian Archdiocese. What follows is an article by Fr. Kyrill which appeared in the Orthodox American (September 1943), which was a sort of forerunner to the modern-day Word Magazine. (Just to clarify: St. Raphael…
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Fr. Kyrill Johnson, 1897-1947
For a while now, I’ve been meaning to introduce Fr. Kyrill Johnson, another of the many fascinating early American converts to Orthodoxy. He was born Arthur Warren Johnson in Roxbury, Massachsetts in 1897. I don’t know what happened to his parents, but Johnson was adopted by an unmarried aunt, who raised him in Ipswich. He…
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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. Bob Atchison, editor of the…
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A visit to the New Orleans Greek church in 1885
Editor’s note: The following excerpt appeared in the Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans and Environs, published by Will H. Coleman in 1885. It is a rare firsthand account of Holy Trinity church in New Orleans in the 19th century. The priest at the time was Fr. Misael Karydis, whose life has been…
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Orthodoxy and Theosophy: the Vera Johnston story
In the early 1900s, a woman named Vera Johnston was involved with the Russian cathedral in New York and the seminary in Tenafly, New Jersey. With a name like Johnston, you might think that she was a convert, which is exactly what I thought when I first ran across her name. But Vera Johnston was actually a cradle-born…
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Source of the week: an interview with Fr. Sebastian Dabovich
Editor’s note: The following interview, with Fr. Sebastian Dabovich, originally appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and was reprinted in the Macon (GA) Telegraph on July 31, 1903. We’re reprinting it here in full. Abbot Sebastian Dabovich, a priest high in the circles of the orthodox Russian church, passed through Seattle yesterday on his way to…
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The American tour of a Greek archbishop in 1893
As we’ve discussed several times in the past, in 1893, a Greek archbishop visited the United States. His name was Archbishop Dionysius Latas of Zante, and he came to America to attend the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. That’s where we last saw him; today, we’ll pick up Abp Dionysius’ trail after the Parliament…