Teva: First of all, I would like to thank you for taking the time for this interview and for sharing your thoughts with the readers of the St. Nina Quarterly.

You grew up in an enclave made up primarily of Romanian immigrants in a small town in New England—a type of environment that is increasingly rare for many Orthodox Christians living in non-Orthodox countries. How did the experience of growing up in an ethnic “village” help to shape your life in the Church?

The language debate in American Orthodoxy has a number of dimensions to it. The first and most obvious of these is the ethnic issue: the degree to which an ethnic language will be used in liturgical celebration as a means of supporting and retaining the specified ethnicity. This, of course, has the effect of defining the identity of the Orthodox Church in a very particular way.