A great man is one who collects knowledge the way a bee collects honey and uses it to help people overcome the difficulties they endure - hunger, ignorance and disease!
- Nikola Tesla

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
- Franklin Roosevelt

While their territory has been devastated and their homes despoiled, the spirit of the Serbian people has not been broken.
- Woodrow Wilson

Oakland 90th Anniversary Greeting 2016

Greeting from His Grace Bishop Maxim of Los Angeles and Western America

Oakland 90th Anniversary Greeting 2016

Dear Brothers and Sisters, our beloved Children in the Lord,

This anniversary in Oakland coincides with the recent canonization of Archimandrite Sebastian (Dabovich) of San Francisco and Jackson, clergyman and preacher of the Gospel who inspired many missionaries. Once again, through the life of this Saint, we see a faith that produces holy persons, enriches the world with saints and insists on an ethos of holiness. 

Living in the Bay area, you might better understand how the life of the Church has the depth and breadth of the open ocean, such that great swells do not make the waters turbid, but release the “ozone” of health and courage which strengthens man in his struggle. When you live in the world that they have shaped and partake in the universal concelebration of heaven and earth which is celebrated in the Orthodox Church, you pulse with a vibration that reveals to you things unseen.

Many times Orthodox immigrants have gone to other countries and not lost our faith and our character, but have often rediscovered and lived them better. Our Orthodox manners and customs are liturgical, and our upbringing, ethos, and education are those of the Church. The axis of our tradition and our life is the God-man. The whole parish is one family, one Church. Its feast and festivals, the feasts of the Church. And the church feasts are the days for its holidays, festivities and songs. The folk songs, their words and their music, are related to the music (and the ethos) of the Church. 

In most cases, Church life in this part of the Serbian Church during the Great Depression survived, its organization preserved at both the diocesan and congregational level. There was even the case of Akron where people, though suffering hardship and destitution during the Depression, through the efforts of their priest Milan Popovic, built a new church dedicated to St. Demetrius. During this period of adversity our people united around their Church, which had also become impoverished, since it was the only place they could turn to and share what little they had in those sad times.

May this Jubilee which we commemorate in Oakland as well as the Commemorative Book marking the ninetieth anniversary of the establishment of the Serbian Orthodox Parish of Saint George, remind us all of the zeal of our ancestors and guide us to the sacred goal of unity in Christ and His Orthodox Church.

 


SA

 

People Directory

Anna Novakov

Anna Novakov (October 2, 1959) is a Serbian-American art historian, critic, educator and curator based at Saint Mary's College of California. A prolific writer, Novakov has received numerous awards and grants for her research and art criticism. In addition to her published essays, collaborations with artists, museum catalogues and exhibition reviews, she is the primary contributor and editor of more than ten books.

.
Read more ...

Publishing

My Brother's Keeper

by Fr. Radovan Bigovic

Rare are the books of Orthodox Christian authors that deal with the subject of politics in a comprehensive way. It is taken for granted that politics has to do with the secularized (legal) protection of human rights (a reproduction of the philosophy of the Enlightenment), within the political system of so-called "representative democracy", which is limited mostly to social utility or to the conventional rules of human relations. Most Christians look at politics and democracy as unrelated with their experience of the Church herself, which abides both in history and in the Kingdom, the eschaton. Today, the commercialization of politics—its submission to the laws of publicity and the brainwashing of the masses—has literally abolished the "representative" parliamentary system. So, why bother with politics when every citizen of so-called developed societies has a direct everyday experience of the rapid decline and alienation of the fundamental aspects of modernity?

In the Orthodox milieu, Christos Yannaras has highlighted the conception of the social and political event that is borne by the Orthodox ecclesiastical tradition, which entails a personalistic (assumes an infinite value of the human person as opposed to Western utilitarian individualism) and relational approach. Fr Radovan Bigovic follows this approach. In this book, the reader will find a faithful engagement with the liturgical and patristic traditions, with contemporary thinkers, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, all in conversation with political science and philosophy. As an excellent Orthodox theologian and a proponent of dialogue, rooted in the catholic (holistic) being of the Orthodox Church and of his Serbian people, Fr Radovan offers a methodology that encompasses the above-mentioned concerns and quests.