an article I wrote<\/a> in defense of the Ecumenical Patriarchate got wide circulation. Last year, the event at the White House involved a brief appearance by George W. Bush, who was not compared to Alexander the Great. The invitation was a surprise to me because I had never been involved in anything like this with the archdiocese. But I’m glad I went. It was a close up look at the concentrated power of the Greek Lobby marshaled for a big day in Washington. You wonder, however, just what this Church could accomplish if it put as many resources into, and developed a “vision” for, evangelizing an American culture that so desperately needs it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Archbishop Demetrios, leader of the largest Orthodox Christian jurisdiction in the United States, compared President Obama to Alexander the Great at a Greek Independence Day celebration at the White House. Politico, noting that the president got “a little unexpected flattery” from the hierarch about his crisis management skills, said the archbishop told Obama: “Following the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[579,584,196,300,425,330,372,329,580,578,216,165,565,334,582,585,424,586,296,581,48,583,49],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1327"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3046,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1327\/revisions\/3046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}