Author: Matthew Namee
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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…
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Cassocks or Collars?
It’s a common debate within American Orthodoxy: should our priests wear cassocks, or should they wear suits and collars like their Roman Catholic and Protestant counterparts? One side rightly argues that cassocks are the traditional and virtually universal style of dress for Orthodox clergy. The other side just as correctly points out that even some American saints wore…
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Reconstructing the life of St. Andrew
This has nothing to do with American Orthodox history, but given what I know of our readership here, I think many of you will greatly enjoy this article. It’s an interview with Greek author George Alexandrou, published in the journal Road to Emmaus. Alexandrou wrote a thousand-page book on St. Andrew the Apostle, pulling together…
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The tombstone of Fr. Kallinikos Kanellas
After I published a piece on Fr. Kallinikos Kanellas earlier this week, I spoke with Fr. Nicholas Verdaris, the pastor of Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. As it turns out, the Annunciation community continues to maintain Kanellas’ gravesite, and Fr. Nicholas was kind enough to send me the above photo of Kanellas’…
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Bashir, the Federation, and SCOBA
On today’s episode of the American Orthodox History podcast, I interviewed SOCHA executive director Fr. Oliver Herbel on the subject of the “Federated Orthodox Greek Catholic Primary Jurisdictions,” a 1943 attempt to create a national, pan-Orthodox organization. The Federation is to SCOBA what the League of Nations was to the United Nations. Both the Federation…