A reader from San Juan writes:
Dan, you did a disservice to Russell Kirk by trivializing. Here is a good article on this brilliant man’s view of science. He called the Shroud of Turin a spiritual and archaeological time bomb that would come to influence science in important ways.
The article is Science Genuine and Corrupt: Russell Kirk’s Christian Humanism by Jeremy M. Beer. It appeared in The Intercollegiate Review in the Fall 1999 edition. Here is a snippet. Read the entire article. It is worth it.
Kirk also believed that scientific analysis of the Shroud of Turin might eventually “undo the reductionist notion of the human condition and restore general awareness of the transcendent.” Toward the latter part of his life, Kirk manifested a keen interest in the Shroud, coming to believe its mysterious image to be that of the crucified Christ. At a conference on the Shroud held at Elizabethtown College in 1986, Kirk spoke
of the Shroud as a “spiritual and archaeological time bomb” and attributed to it immense significance: