Description: While Russian Orthodox theologians celebrated saints as paragons of virtue and piety whose lives were to be emulated in the search for salvation, ordinary believers routinely sought the assistance of the holy dead for commonplace and earthly matters. The Orthodox faithful were more likely to pray to the saints for help in the everyday concerns...
Review Quotes:
"Readable and witty. Integrating Western scholarship with a deep plumbing of archival material, Greene has deftly analyzed the myriad interactions among saints' bones, believers, religious leaders, imperial officials, and Bolsheviks--from the most mundane level to Lenin himself." --Roy R. Robson, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, author of Old Believers in Modern Russia and Solovki
"...[the Bolsheviks] were not wrong in connecting popular piety with the cult of saints' relics, as Robert Greene demonstrates so eloquently in this fascinating monograph....This is an important book that will be of interest to anyone working on Orthodoxy, on religion and modernity, or on religion and revolutionary states." --Church History