Bibliographic record
Abstract
Robert H. Greene. Bodies Like Bright Stars: Saints and Relics in Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. 299 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $42.00, cloth.In this highly original and engaging study of Russia's holy bones, Robert Greene examines the cult of the from 1861 to 1929. With wealth of previously untapped archival material and lively writing style, Greene considers both why and in what ways mattered to the faithful, what the devotion of ordinary believers tells us about their relationship to the Church and its teachings, and how they responded to the atheistic ambitions of Bolsheviks after the Revolutions of 1917. In so doing, his research complements-and greatly enriches-a growing body of scholarship devoted to the everyday practice of Orthodoxy, and to understanding how and why the faith has continued to be meaningful part of Russian culture in the modern period, both before and after the revolutionary period.The first three chapters explore the role of the in culture during the imperial age. Chapter 1 addresses the Church's official prescriptions with respect to saintly devotion as part of larger mission to improve the spiritual condition of the people. Although bodily incorruptibility was not mandatory for relic to be designated as holy, the Church used the uncorrupted state of God's holy both as a prism through which fundamental truths of the faith could be reflected to enlighten the and increasingly, as metaphor to establish Orthodoxy's claim as the one true Church of Christ over and against sectarians, Old Believers, and radical nonbelievers (p. 21). As Greene also finds, however, an enduring tension (and negotiation) evolved between theologians and religious elites who the as shining beacons to lead the faithful to eternal life and most ordinary believers who prized the for their assistance in matters more immediately relevant to this world (p. 9).Focused on the practice of saintly worship, chapter 2 examines the relationships cultivated by individual believers with Saint Feodosii of Chernihiv and Patriarch Saint Germogen. Drawing on remarkably detailed believers' testimonies, Greene brings his readers so close to the sites of saintly shrines that one can almost smell the sweet carnation and honey-like odor of sanctity emanating from the bones, and hear the wailing of believers as they implored saintly doctors for relief from all forms of earthly suffering- everything from toothaches to cancer, theft to arson, unemployment to bankruptcy. While complementing Christine Worobec's findings that miracle narratives were egalitarian across class lines, Greene's evidence also supports Nadia Kizenko's observation that believers turned to to navigate the socio-economic challenges of post-emancipation Russia.Chapter 3 presents case studies of two distinct communities of believers as they sought official recognition for their local saints, Saint Anna of Kashin, and Saint Sofronii of Irkutsk. While demonstrating that Orthodox believers valued miracles first and foremost in their saints (p. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".