Who are your favorite saints and why?
Abba Shenouda the Archimandrite, the abbot of the White Monastery and nephew of Abba Pigol, the founder of Coptic-language literature (he's not the first saint to have used the language, not by a long shot, but he is the one who is most well-known for having purposely used it to write original theological works, whereas the earlier Egyptian fathers like St. Athanasius et. al. wrote in Greek), and my baptismal saint.
HH Pope Timothy II, who led the Church after the death of our teacher St. Dioscorus, and pronounced judgment not only against Eutyches himself by name in council with 500-700 bishops (Ephesus III, 475 AD), but also against those who held that condemned opinion among the renegades in Constantinople, refusing to share any millimeter of agreement with those who denied our Lord's consubstantiality with us in the flesh. He also welcomed back any Chalcedonians to the Church after a very merciful period of waiting (to make sure that they were firm in their decision), receiving them by profession of faith only.
There are many more among the Copts (particularly martyrs like St. Abanoub, St. Pistavros, St. John of Phanijoit, etc.), but among the Armenians I would highlight St. Vartan (387-451), who was killed in the Battle of Avarayr against the Persians which eventually won for the Armenians their right to practice their Christian faith. His history was written by the priest Yeghishe, who also participated in the battle. And also of course St. Mesrop Mashtots, the inventor of the Armenian alphabet, whose biography was written by his student Koriun (the first Armenian-language historian, obviously).
From the Syrians...gosh...there are so many...St. Severus, St. Behnam (4th century; despite his Persian name, he is connected to the Syriac Orthodox tradition in Iraq, as he was martyred on Mt. Alfaf there) and his sister Sarah and the forty martyrs of Sinharib (the father of Behnam and Sarah, who became enraged at their conversion and had them and the others killed), St. Dionysius Bar Salibi (d. 1171), etc. Two that I am not sure are saints but who I personally really like and I think deserve to be known better are Abu Ra'ita al Takriti (9th century Iraq), who wrote several defenses of Christianity in Arabic directed towards the Muslims and also debated the Chalcedonian theologian Theodore Abu Qurrah (by letter, as he was unable to travel there in person) in the court of the Armenian king Ashot IV when Abu Qurrah traveled there 813-817 in an attempt to spread Chalcedonianism in the kingdom, and Iowannis "the Iconoclast", who I guess could also be classed among the Indian Orthodox in particular as well because he went around India during the Portuguese occupation times smashing to pieces Roman Catholic statuary that had been set up in Indian churches, as a protest against the Roman Catholic takeover of Indian churches. I don't love him because he smashed things, but I respect anyone who does not mess around when it comes to making clear where the line is between what is acceptable and what is not, and yeah...that's pretty clear.
Related to that, among the Ethiopians, I would have to mention St. Fasilides, the 17th century emperor who immediately restored the place of Ethiopian Orthodoxy and the EOTC as the country's official religion after the Roman Catholic experiment of Emperor Susenyos, kicked the Jesuits out of the country and burned their books. (They would stay banned for another two centuries or so.) Oh, and I've always liked the story of Abuna Aregawi, one of the
nine saints, who built the monastery at Debre Damo which is incredibly famous for its very remote and difficult to summit location. According to legend, Abuna Aregawi was shown where to build the monastery by a snake, as you can see in the icon in the video below (at 0:45):
Who do you have in common with the RC and OO communions who you think the OO tend to venerate more?
Hmm. I suppose I don't remember ever really hearing anything about the Roman Popes Celestine and Felix before becoming Coptic Orthodox, but they are two that are in our synaxarium, so they are publicly venerated (on Abib 3 and Hator 6, respectively).
Uh....St. Mark...obviously?
I don't know. I know you didn't mean anything bad by it in any way, but I don't feel comfortable phrasing it that way. Whatever others do is whatever others do. Obviously I think my own communion and Church is in some ways uniquely right, but I feel like the whole "we do it more!" thing is just gloating, in a sense. Like it's a pseudo-spiritual way of saying "nyeh nyeh!" and sticking the proverbial tongue out at anyone who made a different decision than you.
Who do you have in your own communion, saints especially dear to you, who are generally not venerated by the non-OO?
Basically all the ones I already mentioned. I guess the more recent saints might be a bit different, if only because they're more immediate in our history. Not just the neomartyrs of Libya and the like (the ones that are on TV right now, in our day), but even just people from the last few centuries more generally, like St. Sidhom Bishay, who was martyred in 1844 after being accused of insulting Islam and refusing to convert to that religion after being ordered to by the judge at the resulting show-trial. I'm thinking of him here because I remember in the thread you made on the EO board All4Christ mentioned St. Laura of Cordoba who was martyred with boiling lead, and St. Sidhom was martyred with molten tar. Apparently some things don't change much over 980 years.
