What Does The Resurrection Mean? Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat
MUST WATCH: Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast, Catholic and conservative (though some might question that) and Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Catholic and conservative discuss What Does The Resurrection Mean?
From Andrew Sullivan’s bio:
Sullivan has spoken at many universities and colleges, including Harvard, Yale, Boston University, Boston College, Northwestern, the University of Washington in Seattle, the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Emory, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Austin, Oxford University, and Milton Academy. He has appeared on over 100 radio shows across the United States, as well as on Nightline, Face The Nation, Meet The Press, Crossfire, Hardball, The O’Reilly Factor, The Larry King Show, Reliable Sources, Hannity and Colmes, and many others. He remains a senior editor at The New Republic, and his book "The Conservative Soul" was published by HarperCollins in 2006.
From Mark Oppenheimer in the New York Times on Ross Douthat:
The obvious allusion in the title of Ross Douthat’s new book, “Bad Religion,” is to a veteran Los Angeles punk band. But I kept thinking of Dan Aykroyd’s “Saturday Night Live” character Leonard Pinth-Garnell, a pompous fop who hosted sketches like “Bad Cinema” and“Bad Ballet.” Pinth-Garnell would introduce a ridiculous performance — think of John Belushi attempting arabesques — then sum up merrily at the end: “Well now! That wasn’t very good at all, was it?”
Mr. Douthat, a Catholic conservativeand an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, has written a book about contemporary American Christianity that is quite good. But the religion he describes is comically bad. On the left, he maintains, American Christianity is beholden to a self-centered, Oprah-fied spirituality, and, on the right, Christianity is too often represented by a jingoistic, wealth-obsessed evangelicalism. Mainline Protestantism is disappearing, and a beleaguered Catholicism is running out of priests. (The author ignores Jews and other non-Christians, who should be grateful to slip his noose.)
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Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
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