Tag: primary sources
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The New York plan of 1866
In 1870, the Russian Church founded a chapel in New York City, and the priest was Nicholas Bjerring, a new convert from Roman Catholicism. The chapel served the Russian and Greek officials in New York…
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The Feast Day of St. Raphael
Tomorrow, the first Saturday in November, is one of St. Raphael’s two feast days. The other, February 27, is the OCA’s feast day for him, and takes place on the day of his death.…
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The many names of Chicago’s Russian church
Sometimes, we historians deal with big, important issues. Other times, we obsess over minutae. Today is one of the latter occasions. Chicago’s OCA cathedral, known for the past century as Holy Trinity, had a…
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“Thank you; we have the original.”
Most of the time, on this website, we talk about the history of Orthodoxy in the Americas. But it’s important to remember that, especially in the 19th century, American Protestant missionaries were traveling in…
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The Reversal of Platon Rozhdestvensky
On today’s podcast on AFR, we discuss the American Orthodox Catholic Church, an early attempt at multi-ethnic jurisdictional unity in the United States. One of the issues brought up was that, within about a…
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The Origins of the “Myth of Unity”
Back in June, I gave a paper at St. Vladimir’s Seminary entitled, “The Myth of Past Unity and the Origins of Jurisdictional Pluralism in American Orthodoxy.” The unwieldy title notwithstanding, the premise of my…
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The controversial Fr. Basil Bouroff
Yesterday, I wrote about St. John Kochurov’s arrival in Chicago, which followed on the heels of Fr. B.A. Bouroff’s expulsion by Bishop Nicholas, on the grounds that Bouroff had taken classes at the University…
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St. John comes to Chicago, 1895
This past weekend, those of us on the New Calendar celebrated the feast day of St. John Kochurov, the Russian New Martyr and former priest of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago. With that in…
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Three bishops for America in 1870?
Yesterday, in my article on James Chrystal, I mentioned, “In 1870, there were various reports that the Russian government planned to assign a bishop to New York and offered the job to Chrystal. He…
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James Chrystal: the first convert priest
A month ago, I did a podcast and wrote an article about the first two American Orthodox convert priests, James Chrystal and Nicholas Bjerring. Today, I’m publishing a brief biography I wrote on Chrystal…