Well, I finally finished it. Three hundred and fifty-two pages. TWO EPISCOPALIANS WALK INTO A BAR: A Conversation About Believing is not a book about the Shroud — but there is a chapter on it, and it surfaces at several points throughout. Not argumentatively. More as part of the longer story of how I think about faith and evidence.

For some readers here, it may shed light on why I changed my mind about the Shroud’s authenticity. I want to be clear about what that means and what it doesn’t. I am not an anti-authenticist. I am not an iconoclast. I cannot have invested so much of myself in this question — so many years, so many conversations, so much genuine hope — and feel anything other than disappointed by where the evidence led me. The Shroud mattered to me. It still does, in ways that are harder to explain than a position paper would suggest.

Maybe someday something will be discovered that changes things. I remain open to that. But I have tried, in this book and elsewhere, to follow the evidence honestly — and honesty, in the end, is the only thing that makes any of this worth doing.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 1.


The Notorious Bishop

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our
existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

It wasn’t high school science—evolution and stuff—that caused my religious faith to unravel. That was only background noise. What I remember most vividly was homeroom held in one of the world history classrooms. Each morning, we recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag with hands over our hearts, followed by the Lord’s Prayer. My seat was next to a wall display: The Twentieth Century.

Pinned there were stark black-and-white photographs cut from Life and other magazines—Hiroshima flattened into ash, a Nazi death camp with its skeletal survivors, a ring of hooded Klansmen encircling a burning cross, a cluster of starving children somewhere in Africa, and the ravages of floods and earthquakes that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Each image was connected with red knitting yarn to a sign that read “Our World Today.” They stared back at me as I said Our Father and One Nation under God. As the familiar words fell from my lips, something hot rose in my chest. What sort of God, if He existed at all, would permit a world like that? Doubt seeped in, accompanied by a slow-burning anger I didn’t yet have a name for.

Had it not been for two extraordinary individuals I met soon afterward—a wounded World War II veteran and a fellow soldier in Vietnam—I might have walked away from God, church, and religion altogether and never returned.

And yet here I was, fifty-odd years later, a lifelong Episcopalian sitting across from a man in his forties who, until recently, had been a lifelong atheist and had just recently joined the Episcopal Church.

“Can we talk?” he had asked when he phoned out of the blue one day. “Over lunch, I mean. I heard your talk at the church in Yonkers. Something you said… well, it helped cement my new belief in God. Lunch is on me.”

I had, in those days, been giving talks about one of my retirement hobbies—a fascination with the Shroud of Turin. I had been doing so at a handful of Catholic and Episcopal churches around the New York area. I was no expert, just absorbed by the subject. I’d landed on a speaker’s list, discovered I enjoyed the back-and-forth with audiences, and kept accepting invitations. It was a time when I thought the Shroud might really be the burial cloth of Jesus. I’ve moved on from that thinking, but I cherish the study of it for what it taught me about faith.

The Shroud of Turin today rests in a temperature-controlled, bomb-resistant, argon-filled display case reliquary in a chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. It is rarely displayed, but during the 2015 exposition, more than a million pilgrims, including Pope Francis, came to see it.

Legally, the Shroud is the property of the Pope, bequeathed to the Holy See in 1983 by Umberto II, the last king of Italy and the final heir of the House of Savoy. Yet to this day, no modern pope—nor the Catholic Church as an institution—has taken an official stance affirming or denying its authenticity. The Church acknowledges the 1988 radiocarbon dating, which points to a medieval origin, while also noting that some scholars have challenged aspects of that testing. There is very little other evidence to suggest that it is authentic.

What intrigues me are the images of a crucified man that can be seen on the cloth; images that so far cannot be chemically and physically explained. For some, it has become a lingering scientific mystery, a window through which the possibility of the miraculous still glimmers.

Ironically, the Shroud—the topic that brought Oyman to my talk—seldom came up in our lunches. Instead, over the course of many meals spanning many months, we talked about belief: what we believed, how we believed it, and the varied ways our fellow Episcopalians seemed to approach faith.

The Episcopal Church is often called a “big-tent” church, and for good reason. Under that broad canopy, you find one of Christianity’s great experiments in diversity and tolerance: conservatives and progressives, evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, soaring cathedrals and humble rural chapels. All kinds of God’s people. It is a wide, sometimes unruly fellowship—and, for us, a home.

***

“Can God control the flip of a coin as it spins heads over tails through the air?” he yelled at me, his voice booming across the crowded restaurant in midtown Manhattan. I was still only halfway between the front door and his table in the center of the restaurant, escorted by the hostess. This lunch today was our first meeting.

“You do believe in God, don’t you?” he added in a head-turning shout. Then he added, “Sit down. People are staring.”