Mysteries Experienced, the Messianic Banquet Engaged, Heaven Joined to Earth: An Eastern Orthodox Religious Experience

Eastern Orthodoxy has retained its ethnic origins in the United States more visibly than other immigrant churches. For one thing, there are main Orthodoxies: Russian (the earliest, establishing a mission in Alaska at the end of the eighteenth century), Greek, Armenian, Antiothian, Syrian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and the like, each with its own language, culture, tradition, and connection with the liturgy. Although initial congregations often were multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, increasing immigration, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, established single-ethnic communities that supported religious congregations as well as social and fraternal organisations. By the 1950s, spurred by Will Herberg's identification of American religion as Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955), Eastern Orthodoxy was nominated by some commentators as America's fourth religion. This potential recognition soon collapsed in the lace of other claimants to the title, such as African American religion and the rapidly growing Pentecostal churches, and the entire effort of numbering groups in the American religious pantheon passed into the acknowledgment of increasing religious pluralism within the country. Although a Greek settlement was first established before the American Revolution in what later became the state of Florida, the earliest Greek Orthodox congregations were not organized until the 1860s in the port cities of Galveston and New Orleans. The next congregation to be established was in New York City in 1891, the first of 139 congregations over the next thirty-one years, mostly in urban centers, the result of sharply increasing immigration. Jurisdictional disputes, political strife in Greece, and fierce congregational loyalties dominated by lay trustees (who had arrived before the clergy) prevented the establishment of larger denominational organization and direction, despite the fact that congregations usually received their priests from Greece. The archbishop of Athens, Meletios, came to the United States in 1918, hoping to develop a national structure for the Greek churches. Alter first being deposed in Greece in a dispute over political allegiances and then elected Patriarch of Constantinople in 1921, Meletios called a Patriarchate synod, which dissolved the previous connection of the Greek congregations in America to the Church of Greece, established The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, and announced the election of an archbishop who would serve under the patriarch's ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Brief skirmishes resulting from disputes with the Church of Greece over jurisdiction of the United States congregations, as well as disruptions produced by the ongoing conflict between Greece and Turkey, made the 1920s a difficult decade for the slowly organizing American Church. In 1924, restrictive federal legislation reduced immigration from southern European countries, including Greece, to a trickle, and issues of ethnic and religious identity, previously more loosely felt because many immigrants had not planned to become permanent residents, became more pressing. By the 1930s, with the coining of Archbishop Athenagoras, an era of stability gradually emerged. A theological seminary was founded in 1937 to begin the process of preparation of persons for the priesthood, eventually locating in Brookline, Massachusetts and developing full accreditation. As the church grew in numbers, it was divided into more districts, each headed by a bishop. In 1996 the Archdiocese that had since 1922 covered the entire Western hemisphere was divided into lour archdioceses: South America, Mexico and Central America, Canada, and America (the United States). The latter body is the largest Orthodox church in the country, with over five hundred parishes and nearly two million members. Its greatest concentrations are in the Northeast, the industrial Mideast (with centers in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh), southern Florida, and southern California. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.