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d most of the behavior questions positively among all three generations and no significant difference was observed among the three generations for most of the questions. Our findings also supported that regardless of the generation status, the participants in our study had very strong positive attitudes towards the Greek Orthodox Church. The vast majority of the participants agreed that it is important for their children and people of Greek ancestry to participant and belong to the Greek Orthodox Church and at least some part of Sunday worship should be conducted in Greek. Yet, their actual behaviors in terms of their participation of the Greek Orthodox Church showed minor decline across generations.

Significant difference was only found between the First and Third generation in terms of “whether their children attend or attended an afternoon Greek school” and “whether part of the Sunday worship should be conducted in Greek”. The results demonstrated that Greek Americans continued to rely on the Orthodox Church to reinforce their ethnic identities. Furthermore, our study examined the perception of respondents on their understanding of the Orthodox Faith. Our religious core beliefs help us face the problems of life and prepare us for salvation as well as keep our Hellenic identity. We must have a sufficient knowledge and understanding of orthodoxy and share this faith with others. Our results showed that the vast majority (94%) of the respondents - regardless of generation - believed that they had good or very good understanding of the Orthodox Faith, the Divine Liturgy and the Holy Sacraments. The Divine Liturgy is the most significant ancient Christian service and the center of the inspiration of the first Christians in their communion with God and with one another (Mastrantonis, 2004). The Divine Liturgy is the central worship service of the Orthodox Church which is celebrated every Sunday morning and on all Holy Days. The Liturgy is also the means by which we achieve union with Jesus Christ and unity with each other through the Sacrament of the Holy Communion. The Holy Sacraments are composed of prayers, hymns, scripture lessons, gestures and processions. Most of the Sacraments use a portion of the material of creation as an outward and visible sign of God's revelation (Fitzgerald, 2004).

In our study, only six respondents admitted that they had poor or non-existent understanding of the Orthodox Faith and the majority of these six respondents also had poor ability to understand and speak Greek. This is an important issue as both Greek America and its Orthodox population underwent significant generational transformations during1940 to1990. As a result, religious faith and ethnic identity, once seen as inseparable, were increasingly less understood as such by the socially mobile, geographically dispersed, English-speaking second, third or beyond generations of Orthodox faithful in America, not to mention an ever-increasing number of converts (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, 1995).

The Greek Archdiocese, for whom the very definition of Greek identity comes from the Greek language, has undergone continuous debate on the issue本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。