Tag: relics

  • Book Review: Saints Preserved: An Encyclopedia of Relics by Thomas J. Craughwell

    How many heads did Saint John the Baptist have? And whatever happened to the eye of Saint Edward Oldcorne?

  • Finger and a face

    Two years ago I committed one of the more heroic acts in my life. I drove in Italy. To locate my valor more precisely, I drove through Pisa to take my family to see “The Leaning Tower Of.” Until that trip, my wife and children did not know my head could rotate so nimbly, or…

  • Fragments of Secular Sanctity

    Galileo’s relics are to be housed, not in a cathedral, but in a public museum. That is why I am not sure whether this is a story about religion, or about science, or about art. Perhaps it is a story about something else entirely, a curious and half-hidden alternation between the sacred and profane.