Book excerpt: "This collection of essays is a welcome and refreshing gift in a virtual desert. There has been very little comparative anthropological research on the Eastern churches, and this volume will fill that gap."—Michael Herzfeld, author of Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome "At long last there is a book on the anthropology of Christianity that devotes direct and sustained attention to the diverse Eastern Christian Churches—both Orthodox and Catholic. This book should be read by anyone who thinks anthropologically about Christianity. Scales will fall from their eyes and they will behold an entire wing of Christianity that has, until now, gone mostly unnoticed and practically untheorized."—Douglas Rogers, author of The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals