Every day of the church year is marked by the memory of saints. We come across references to the saints in the pages of Scripture. We celebrate the memory of the apostles, the martyrs, the righteous reverend, holy bishops, pious rulers, and so on. Local churches themselves perform canonizations with various frequency. But, as often happens in the history of theology, the meaning of holiness, of what is meant by “you are a holy nation,” has been transformed since the apostolic era.

That saints are products of not only the societies that they lived in but also the ones they continue to engage, is by now a truism. It is not only a matter of making it into the menaia and once in, always in. Servicebooks can be altered. To use the metaphor of a modern museum, just as it is possible to enter the collection, so it is possible to be deaccessioned or put in storage, rarely to see the light of day.

Unlike the regions of “Old World” Orthodoxy—that is, the parts of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and India where Chalcedonian and Non-Chalcedonian Orthodox Churches have long existed —the lands of the New World do not yet have many local saints to laud on their calendars. The great heroes of the faith — the Apostles, the Myrrhbearing Women, the early martyrs and confessors, the great missionaries and healers—find honor and praise around the world wherever the Divine Liturgy is served and wherever the faithful call upon their intercession.

The landmark recording of the American gospel hymn “When the Saints Go Marching In” was produced in 1938 by Louis Armstrong and his orchestra. Undoubtedly, Americans over the age of thirty can immediately hear the tune in their heads: “Oh, when the saints go marching in… Lord, I want to be in that number, when the saints go marching in.” But what most people do not know is that the lyrics were inspired by the biblical book of Revelation and other parts of Scripture.

While the history of the iconoclastic controversy has long occupied center stage in the currently flourishing discipline of Byzantine Studies—and has recently attracted the attention of some of the original and most seasoned scholars in the field—an authoritative survey of iconoclasm does not yet exist. Still, our knowledge of this reassessed landscape is much improved, and consensus on key aspects is often possible.

Just a few miles to the south of Peloponnesus, washed by waters of the Aegean Sea, lies the isle of Kythira, the southernmost of the Ionian islands. It doesn’t attract as many tourists as better known destinations, such as Corfu or Zakynthos; it is a quiet (thus a bit rugged) resort popular among the Greeks, with very few foreigners—mainly Australians, since many Greek immigrants embarked from this particular island in the late nineteenthth century to seek a better life Down Under.

I once met a monk on the Holy Mountain. No one knew how old he was, but he would speak of the crowning of that heretic Charlemagne as if it happened in his middle-aged years. He told a story of a priest from “the world” who visited Mount Athos some 200 years ago—within recent memory for the monk.

Avant-garde poet in the sophisticated intellectual milieu of Saint Petersburg, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia, twice married and divorced, mother of three children, later a devoted nun of the Russian Church in exile, and finally a member of the resistance in occupied France who was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died shortly before the liberation: such was the path of Mother Maria Skobtsova’s life.

In the aftermath of the recent council held in Crete, the waters of the Orthodox world are still troubled by several disputes concerning both administrative and theological issues. Here I would like to tackle one of the theological matters: the distinction between the Orthodox Church and non-Orthodox Churches made in the document “Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World.”