Dr. Phil Nordquist

I guess in my last e-mail to him I had commented how the oldest Lutheran Church in the west was a Finnish congregation in Sitka , Alaska . I knew that because a guest speaker, Dr Phil Nordquist of Pacific Lutheran University came to Central during our centennial year and quizzed us. He asked what the oldest Lutheran Church in the West was. I knew the answer or thought I did-St. Mark's in San Francisco which dated back to the gold rush and was proud of being the oldest. What I didn't think of was Russian Alaska. Nordquist told us how a Finnish governor built a Lutheran Church as well as an orthodox church in New Archangel, Sitka , in the 1790s. Or maybe it was September 11 th and the remembrance of events in 2001 which had affected Petri very much, as he wrote, "I looked at what I believed from top to bottom.

Philip NordquistDept. of HistoryEmail: nordqupa@plu.edu Phone: Fax: