I’m pleased to announce the publication of my book, Our Hunger for Signs: The Shroud of Turin as a Case Study.
Now Available from Amazon in Kindle and Paperback
Preface to the Book
This book began with a question that would not go away.
The question was not whether the Shroud of Turin is authentic. That question has occupied researchers, scientists, historians, and believers for more than a century, and it shows no sign of being settled to everyone’s complete satisfaction in the near future. The question that would not go away was a different one, and in some ways a more unsettling one: what would it mean if it were real?
That question is theological rather than scientific, and it belongs to a tradition of theological reflection that is older and deeper than the Shroud controversy itself. It belongs to the tradition that has always insisted, from the Hebrew prophets through the Christian mystics through the modern philosophers of religion, that the God of Christian faith is a God who hides — and that the hiddenness is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be reckoned with. It belongs to the tradition that has always suspected, with Pascal, that a God who overwhelmed the human intellect with irresistible proofs would be producing something other than faith — something more like compulsion dressed in epistemological clothing. It belongs to the tradition that has always known, with the mystics, that the hunger for signs is real and serious and theologically significant, and that it points toward something that no sign, however compelling, can finally deliver.
This book applies that tradition to the Shroud. It does so with genuine respect for those who believe in the Shroud’s authenticity and genuine sympathy for the hunger that belief expresses. The longing for tangible contact with the sacred event at the center of Christian faith is not a spiritual immaturity to be outgrown. It is a form of love. What this book asks is whether the object that longing has fastened upon can bear the weight being placed upon it — and whether the tradition of the hidden God might offer something more durable, if less immediately satisfying, than authentication could provide.
The argument is constructive rather than polemical. It does not set out to debunk the Shroud or to embarrass those who venerate it. It sets out to reframe the question — to ask not whether the cloth is authentic but what the hunger for its authenticity reveals about us, and where that hunger, rightly received and honestly followed, is trying to take us. The answer it finds is the answer the tradition has always offered: not the resolution of the hunger but the deepening of it, not the satisfaction of the longing but the purification of it, not the end of the journey but the invitation to continue into the hiddenness where God has always been waiting.
A word about what this book is not. It is not a scientific study of the Shroud, and it does not pretend to adjudicate the technical questions that surround the object. Those questions are real and they are worth pursuing, and the For Further Reading section at the end of this book points toward the work of those better qualified than this author to address them. It is not a history of the Shroud, though it draws on that history where relevant. And it is not a devotional work, though it is written in the conviction that theology at its best is always, in some sense, devotional — that the love of God and the love of understanding are not finally separable, and that the questions this book asks are worth asking precisely because they matter beyond the page.
What it is, is an invitation. An invitation to sit with one of the most fascinating and most theologically productive objects in the history of Christianity, and to ask not only what it is but what it means — not only whether it is authentic but what a different kind of authenticity, deeper and more durable than carbon dating can measure, might look like. The reader who accepts that invitation will find, this book hopes, that the Shroud is more interesting than either its champions or its detractors have quite recognized. And that the God it points toward is more interesting still.