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

Divine Liturgy at the Heart of Serbian Life

The oldest and the newest Serbian book in North America is the Služebnik (Liturgy book) used lovingly by clergy for the Divine Services. One was published in 1519 in Venice and the other in 2018 in Los Angeles, California.

Тhe Služebnik was printed in Venice in 1519 by Božidar Vuković, a Serb from Montenegro became a renowned printer in Venice. This printed version of the Divine Liturgy was the first printed book in Cyrillic in history. It is of priceless value to Serbian and Slavic heritage and literature. This rare book belonged to the Very Reverend Milutin Tesla (1819–1879) who was the father of Nikola Tesla (1856–1943). When Milutin died his widow, Djuka (nee Mandić) kept the book. After her death, Nikola Tesla took the rare copy to New York with him and had it restored. This rare Book of the Serbian Liturgy is in the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, in the heartland and physical center of the United States. It was restored by the Truman library in 1977.

“The Sacred and Divine Liturgy оf our Father among the Saints John Chrysostom” was published in 2018 by St. Sebastian Press of the Western American Diocese in English and Serbian, and edited by Bishop Maxim Vasiljević of Western American Diocese.

Although 500 years separate these two publications, their existence witnesses to the fact that the Divine Liturgy continues to be at the heart of Serbian life and culture.


SA

 

People Directory

Nikola Moravčević

Nikola Moravčević (Cyrillic: Никола Моравчевић) is a University Professor, Critic and academic writer. He was born in Zagreb, (Yugoslavia) in a family of Serbian officer of Yugoslav Royal Army on December 10, 1935.

After he completed undergraduate studies at the Academy for Theatre Arts at the University of Belgrade in 1955, he moved to the United States. After three years of service in the U.S. Army, he continued his Graduate studies, obtaining a magisterial degree in Theatrical Directing from the School of Theatre Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1961, and in 1964 a doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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Publishing

The Presence of Transcendence

Essays on Facing the Other through Holiness, History and Text

by Bogoljub Sijakovic

The essays collected in this book venture into various domains of philosophy, such as ontology and epistemology, anthropology and ethics, philosophy of history and history of philosophy, philosophy of religion and theory of the mystical, poetics and hermeneutics. The problems here thematized, which are brought to us primarily by the tradition of Hellenism and Christianity as well as life itself, are both traditional and contemporary: self-knowledge and knowledge of God, transcendence and paradoxy, theodicy and anthropodicy, sacrifice, violence, holiness, responsibility, decision-making, evil, guilt, repentance, forgiveness, memory, as well as: wisdom, suffering, good, the other, freedom, fate, history, the Balkans, war, rationality, and also: reading, dialogue, poetry, metaphysic of light.