July 2011 – Page 2 – Shroud of Turin: Should You Believe It is Real?

Two Episcopalians Walk Into a Bar. One is a cradle churchgoer whose faith has wavered but never quite failed. The other is a scientist who spent his adult life as an atheist and has only recently, reluctantly, begun to believe. They order oysters. They start talking.

What follows is a conversation that lasted more than a year — about God and hiddenness, about miracles and what the word almighty actually means, about the Resurrection and whether it happened in the ways we imagine, about N.T. Wright and John Shelby Spong and Rowan Williams and why three bishops and scholars of the Anglican Communion can hold such strikingly different views about the same empty tomb.

Two Episcopalians Walk Into a Bar is not a theology textbook or a devotional. It is the kind of conversation that happens when two ordinary people — neither of them experts, both of them serious — decide to follow the hard questions wherever they lead. The Episcopal tradition has always made room for exactly this kind of inquiry: faith held with conviction and curiosity, doubt treated as a companion rather than an enemy.

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