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Pollen in the cloth, bugs, burial aloes, human blood (type AB as allegedly determined in 1982), anatomical wound accuracy, but above all, the image of the man, somehow represented in photo negative on linen. … Dr. Habermas had firmly planted the splinter of the Shroud in my brain.

Not long after my first Shroud encounter I flew home from Virginia to visit my parents in Idaho. The Shroud traveled with me. It rankled. As it has for many people before me, it became a personal problem of my own. Not because its authenticity would overthrow my entire worldview, as it would for a secularist, but because it smelled false. The blood was wrong, somehow coagulated unnaturally. The face looked nothing like the pumpkin that we see in the Death Mask of Agamemmnon. Somehow the cloth would have to have been stretched flat to receive the three dimensional head on a two dimensional surface. Despite all of its complexity it felt very off. Impressive, inexplicable, but off.

I woke on my first morning back in Idaho and went and sat in my parent's living room. My mother was around, in and out of the room, talking to me. I don't think I was very responsive. The Shroud weighed on me. The centuries old puzzle sat there, staring me in the face, and, well, puzzled me. I responded to its challenge by achieving near motionlessness, a thoroughly shanghaied mind.

The second photographer chosen was Commander Giuseppe Enrie. Unlike Pia, he was given much freer rein with the cloth, but also unlike Pia, he had to deal with (it is said) hundreds of dignitaries, experts and scholars watching his every move. A special commission of photographers watched every stage of his work and issued a notarized statement affirming that his work was free of retouching. He eventually developed three photos of the entire Shroud, and nine details, the most famous of which is an image of the Man in the Shroud's face, which he was able to take close up, free of glass, and life-size while archbishop Cardinal Fossati smoothed the linen. The Shroud has been photographed many times since 1931, by professionals and otherwise, but in every case, the white, positive face emerges in the negative. It seemed far more reasonable to most people to assume (as it still does to many) that the Shroud was authentic than to think that some medieval relic forger could have created such a striking image, and one that would not even be visible to any man until some six or seven centuries later with the invention of photography. In 1898 two artists were commissioned to produce detailed reproductions of the Shroud. Reffo and Cussetti worked with the Shroud in front of them. The clunkiness of their productions affirms the impossibility of the forger's task. Photo negatives of their work bear no resemblance to reality.

The production of a photo negative by an artist is so counter intuitive to our nature and experience that professional artists cannot even accurately make a copy of a negative that sits before them. It is on this fact that proponents of the Shroud's authenticity pitch their tents and camp. The carbon dating results cannot be accurate, they argue, until it can be shown that such an image could have been produced by medieval man.

My mother had recently given me a collection of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. She knew that I had begun reading the Catholic apologist and was thoroughly enjoying him. Reading him is more like eating sausage and drinking thick beer at a circus than it is like reading philosophy of religion—just how he wanted it. Chesterton disliked his Father Brown stories, though they are perhaps what he is best known for (in secular circles). So it always seems to go. A. A. Milne wanted to write mysteries, but is stuck with Christopher Robin going hoppity-hoppity-hop. I can understand why GKC deprecated his Father Brown stories. They are repetitive. His love of paradox repeats itself again and again, and the same themes run through every story. Taken individually each story can be enjoyable, but most people find them too homogenous to take in too many at one go. I had read his entire collection straight through—the literary equivalent of eating three packs of Oreos as an after-school snack—and somehow, still enjoyed them. They made me smarter, for the time being.

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