Tag: primary sources
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Fr. Arsenios Davis & communion with Episcopalians
Officially, of course, the Orthodox Church has never been in communion with the Protestant Episcopal Church. Yes, there’s been some close dialogue over the years, and once upon a time even St. Raphael blessed his people to seek out Episcopal priests in extreme situations (though he soon rescinded that permission). Still, Orthodoxy has never entered…
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Orthodoxy in Chicago, 1888-1892
Back in June, I did one of my first podcasts on an attempt, in 1888, to form a multiethnic parish in Chicago. Here are the basics: By 1888, there were about a thousand Orthodox Christians living in Chicago, most of them Greeks and Serbs / Montenegrins. A few years earlier, they had organized themselves into an Orthodox society…
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St. Tikhon’s Vision, 1905
In 1905, the Holy Synod of Russia was preparing for an All-Russian Council. In advance of this, the Synod asked all the diocesan hierarchs of the Russian Church to send in their opinions on various church reform issues. St. Tikhon was among the respondents, and a portion of his reply has become rather famous among…
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Fr. Ambrose Vretta: pioneering priest in Chicago & Seattle
In the past, I’ve mentioned the Russian Mission’s practice of employing “client clergy” — non-Russian priests with ties to Russia, who served multiethnic or non-Russian parishes in America. St. Raphael and Fr. Sebastian Dabovich are perhaps the most famous examples, but there were many more. One of the earliest of these client clergy was Fr. Ambrose…
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The Russian Diocese in 1905
In 1905, the Roman Catholic religious writer Andrew Shipman wrote an article on the Russian Church in America. It’s an enlightening piece, a snapshot of the Russian Mission taken by an intelligent outsider. Given that the Russian Mission is the subject of my latest podcast on Ancient Faith Radio, I thought this would be a…
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Isabel Hapgood on St. John of Kronstadt
A couple of weeks ago, we reprinted St. Alexander Hotovitzky’s 1904 account of his meeting with St. John of Kronstadt. Nearly a decade earlier, the famous translator Isabel Hapgood wrote her own profile of St. John — then known as Fr. John Sergieff, pastor of St. Andrew’s Church in Kronstadt. The article appeared in The Independent…
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The Lost Church of Baltimore
The 1890s witnessed the initial proliferation of Orthodox churches in the contiguous United States, and most of those early parishes are still with us today — both Greek churches in New York City, the Greek and Russian churches in Chicago, St. Alexis Toth’s parishes in Minneapolis and Wilkes-Barre. But one early effort didn’t make it…