After four days of wall-to-wall Michael Jackson coverage, with no letup in sight, if there is one thing I’m thoroughly sick of hearing, it’s the obligatory reference to Jackson as a “pop icon.” If my unscientific survey is any indication, the term “icon” is now used far more often than “idol” to describe celebrity figures.

It’s probably a sore point with other Orthodox Christians, as well, for whom the term “icon” has a special and restricted meaning, and refers to the religious art works—depictions of Biblical figures, saints, and most of all, Jesus Christ and his mother Mary, whom we term the Theotokos or God-bearer—that line the walls of our churches. Expansive, often wildly colored, possessing their own vocabulary of design conventions that strictly guide the presentation of such elements as Christ’s eyes and the color of Mary’s robes, icons had their origins, in part, in the need to instruct the illiterate in the tenets of the faith.

But they are no mere illustrations: they are the “existential link between the worshipper and God,” to use Anthony Coniaris’ phrase from his “Orthodoxy 101” guide Introducing the Orthodox Church. In the Orthodox understanding, icons do not merely depict transcendent realities, but actually make them truly, physically present. They are “windows into Heaven,” to use a common, if overly saccharine phrase. They serve to remind us that the boundaries of space and time are porous.

What, then, by contrast, does the term “icon” mean in contemporary usage, and how does it relate, or not, to the ancient understanding? (Which, I might add, is not only a Christian understanding, as I discovered when visiting the Buddhist temples at Sarnath in India.)

The most basic, K-car definition of “icon” in the dictionary is “[a]n image; a representation,” or alternately, a symbol.

Back when I lived in Houston, there was a popular stationery store called “Iconography,” which sold high-end cards and paper, most of them decorated with architectural detailing, images of Virginia Woolf, ironic phrases, and so forth. Perhaps I’m reaching too far back into my superficial graduate school reading of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” but the current understanding of “icon” seems to rest upon the very reproducibility and ubiquity of the image in question (and to what end those reproduced images are used), rather than the image or reality—or Image and Reality, as we Orthodox would put it—that lies behind it.