By Olga Sibert Come on in. Sit down. Rest yourself. Settin’s cheaper’n standin’. Here in the Appalachians we have a person known as a Granny Woman. I was privileged to grow up with one and I pray, God willing, I will be one myself someday. On this past May 6th, as I was researching and reading […]
Come Home, Y’all
Each of us has ancestors, both physical and spiritual, who gave us [our] language, culture and, most importantly, [our] faith … To lose touch with that past, with those ancestors, means to become spiritually dry. — His Holiness Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All-Russia Some say that Orthodoxy suffers from a lack of converts here […]
Hillbilly Thomists or Hillbilly Hesychasts for the South?
By Walt Garlington “Through this (theoria) a man is deified, not through reflecting on words or visible things, but taught by silence.” — St. Gregory Palamas Mr. Joseph Pearce gives a very good illustration of how the West has gone astray after leaving its first love, the Orthodox Church, for Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. At […]
Ortho Dixie: Orthodox Christianity and Southern Identity
By Stephen Borthwick Anyone who has grown up in the melting pot of immigrant religiosity of the industrial northeast has a very specific vision of Southern religiosity – evangelical, provincial, low-church, and rabidly anti-Catholic, among other things. Even growing up in a household sympathetic to the South, I had plenty of condescending ignorance about the […]
Through the Mud
By Theodore Phillips Most modern Christian churches are stuck in the mud. Rain, old ruts, sinkholes and dead end paths lead many astray, bog down a few more and cause even more to abandon the path and surrender the struggle. There is a way to clean this mud road up and lay the foundations of a […]
The Real Old Time Religion
By A.J. Conyers People in the South who are intuitively attuned to its culture and history suspect that what passes for popular, evangelical religion in the region is not precisely what it has been in the past. Besides the fact that the South, like other parts of the country, is slowly giving in to the […]
Metropolitan Jonah Serves at Ludwell-linked Chapel
First Orthodox Liturgy Celebrated at Historic William & Mary Wren Chapel On Sunday, March 16, 2014, at the request of the College of William & Mary’s Orthodox Christian Fellowship, Metropolitan Jonah (Paffhausen; former Archbishop of Washington and Metropolitan of All America & Canada of the Orthodox Church in America) celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the […]
What Makes Southern Manners Peculiar?
By Ward S. Allen Southerners live in the 18th century. This common charge is not altogether false, since the peculiar habits, customs, and meanings of words found often in the American South are found also in 18th century English authors. Such a word is manners. Most English-speaking people and some Southerners use the word now […]
The Return of the King? Jacobitism vs. Jacobinism in Appalachia and Russia
By Fr. Dcn. Paul Siewers Recently I was blessed to talk with a group of seminarians at Jordanville (via Zoom) in Professor Deacon Andrei Psarev’s history seminar at Holy Trinity Seminary. In that conversation (linked elsewhere here) I mentioned what I called “overlaps” between aspects of American and Russian cultural paradigms, along with obvious differences. I […]
Appalachian Orthodox Paschal Hymn
By Fr. Ernesto M. Obregón Father Justin Patterson of the OCA uploaded [this video] to Facebook. It is the Paschal troparion sung to Appalachian harmonies, but conforming to tonal rules of the Slavic Orthodox. It was sung at a music workshop at the All American Council of the Orthodox Church in America, meeting in Atlanta […]
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