Category: Orthodoxy in the Americas
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The Other American Orthodox Saints: A Pilgrim’s Guide
NOTE: I have continually updated this article as I have received more information or had new thoughts occur to me. For Orthodox Christians, what do California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC have in common? They all have major relics of Orthodox saints that American Orthodox Christians largely don’t…
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When a god visited Congress
In 1934, St John Maximovitch was ordained ROCOR bishop of Shanghai and sent to shepherd the Russian exiles in China. Even before his episcopal ordination, when St John was teaching at the Bitol seminary in Serbia, the great Serbian bishop Nicholai Velimirovich famously said, “If you desire to see a living Saint, go to Bitol…
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St Tikhon to Antioch: Set Up Shop in America!
Editor’s note: Last year, Scott Kenworthy (whose landmark biography of St Tikhon comes out in November and is available now for preorder) sent me a remarkable email. He had discovered a letter written by Patriarch Tikhon to Patriarch Gregory IV of Antioch in 1922, dealing with the jurisdiction of Syrians/Antiochians in North America. The letter…
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Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical to Greece, and an Orthodox Response
The new Pope of Rome, Leo XIV, has made it clear that he chose his name in honor of his predecessor Leo XIII. This is especially interesting to me as an Orthodox historian, since Leo XIII took a particular interest in Orthodoxy, and at the turn of the last century, Orthodox leaders and scholars (including…
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St Raphael Hawaweeny vs Pope Leo XIII
In 1894, Pope Leo XIII issued a papal encyclical on the “Eastern Rites” — that is, the Uniates, those groups who use traditional Orthodox liturgical rites but submit themselves to the Pope of Rome. In 1898, St Raphael Hawaweeny, then an archimandrite in New York, published a response to the papal encyclical in a periodical…
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A Plea for English in Greek Orthodox Services in 1963
The US Congress imposed immigration quotas in 1924, ending the Ellis Island era of immigration. With no more newcomers, Orthodoxy in America began to assimilate more rapidly into American society, as the children and grandchildren of the original immigrants came to see themselves as Americans, even if they held onto their cultural inheritances (which, in…
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The Orthodox Baptism of a Civil War Veteran
Last week, we published the story of William Hoskins, an 89-year-old veteran of the American Civil War who traveled from Los Angeles to San Francisco in December 1900 to be baptized into the Orthodox faith by St Sebastian Dabovich. Shortly after this, Fr Kirill Sokolov, dean of Holy Trinity Cathedral (OCA) in San Francisco, sent…
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US Civil War Veteran Baptized by St Sebastian Dabovich
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the number of Orthodox in America had not reached 50,000, but it already had several distinguished converts to the Orthodox Faith from Protestantism and Roman Catholicism: William Hoskins, an eighty-nine-year-old Civil War veteran who was a Baptist from Los Angeles, who traveled to San Francisco to meet a…
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Karloutsos and Biden
This is the fifth article in our series on Fr Alex Karloutsos. Here are the first four: The Father Alex Karloutsos Origin Story Karloutsos and the Rise of Bartholomew Father Alex and the Mother Church Karloutsos and 9/11 “I first met Joe Biden in 1987, when he ran for President of the United States,” Fr…
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Karloutsos and 9/11
This article is the fourth in a series on Fr Alex Karloutsos, based on many hours’ worth of interviews I did with him in 2024. Here are the previous three installments: The Father Alex Karloutsos Origin Story Karloutsos and the Rise of Bartholomew Father Alex and the Mother Church By 2001, the brief tenure of…