imageDavor Aslanovski writes in Deum Videre: The nature of the beast – part four:

But I do assure you, the beast is ‘sindonology.’

And I will drag this curious creature of the intellectual night, by its horns, into the light of reason (and true Catholic faith), and keep it there until I’m sure it’s dead. And then I will give it a grave such as it deserves – a novel. Not a history book that debunks the laughable esoteric myths and puts Byzantine neologisms back in their context. ‘Sindonology’ does not deserve to lie in such a tomb. It needs to be buried in a novel that will preserve its true crimes – its effects on human souls and minds.

I just want to know who will play me when the novel becomes a movie. In all seriousness, read the entire posting. There is some merit to what he says in this repeated paragraph:

Sindonology can, obviously, be a dark forest into which a serious and sincere scientist will enter only to lose his path and to never re-emerge. Since modern science has not been able to satisfyingly explain the formation of the image on the Turin Shroud, it offers itself to belief in its having a miraculous origin. And to be sure, if such an origin is accepted, it burdens a scientist with a limitation of competence even greater than that which he customarily encounters with objects believed to possess a miraculous agency. Indeed, it engenders such an ontological specificity of the object that a scientist is no longer only limited in his competence, but fully incompetent. And soon enough he no longer has any reason to approach the subject as a scientist at all. If it is accepted as a miraculously created image of dead Jesus, consistent with the Biblical accounts of his Passion, then its provenance has to be 1st-century Jerusalem. It simply does not make much sense for such an image to come from any other time or place. And a historian is then charged with providing a pre-history for this object, leading up to its first irrefutable attestation in 14th-century France. If that image is truly miraculous in origin, it demands this pre-history, and the task of the historian quickly ceases to be the reconstruction of past events, and becomes the corroboration of presupposed knowledge. History is then no longer an inductive science, but becomes a deductive, retrospective interpretation akin mostly to Talmudical hermeneutics. And for that reason, it is truly deplorable that this fascinating relic has mainly been examined within the confines of sindonology.

The part in red is his highlighting, not mine. And it is what I mostly disagree with. Davor will need to write himself into this novel. Who should play him?