Reading the Shroud Backwards

Mark Dery, writing in Religion Dispatches magazine, may be right. But is ‘fandom’ the right word. I favor ‘faith.’ But in this case, if you read the whole tiresome article, The Transfiguration of the Fanboy, fandom fits.

To the devout, the blurry apparitions of the messiah on Veronica’s Veil and the Shroud of Turin are palpable evidence of Christ’s historical reality and of his divinity. But they can also be read backwards, as visual metaphors for the shadow of a doubt that haunts all fandom . . .

Does a shadow of a doubt about our faith drive some of us to study the shroud?