SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium: Scholars and seekers explore new research

 

SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium

Scholars and seekers explore new research

I recently had the great good fortune to attend the SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium in Florissant, roughly twenty miles northwest of St. Louis, Missouri. This conference was held between July 30 and August 3, 2025 on the 284 acres of the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school. The campus includes lush woods, prairie restoration, walking paths to the Missouri River, and a two-story glass-walled dining room offering treetop views. Conference papers were presented by forty-nine speakers from at least seven nations with degrees from a variety of disciplines, including physics, chemistry, law, history, theology, medicine, mathematical modeling, crime lab analysis, and mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering.

The Shroud of Turin is an approximately fourteen-feet by three-feet piece of linen cloth that bears an image of a man crucified as Jesus was, as described in the Gospels. Image features include puncture wounds on the head, where a crown of thorns might have penetrated the scalp, a side wound consistent with the size and shape of a Roman lance, beard-plucking, facial injury, and scourge marks. Some believe that the Shroud of Turin served as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Others insist that the Shroud is a reprehensible hoax. Controversy surrounds the Shroud, often described as the single most studied artifact in history.

The agreed upon history of the Shroud begins in mid-fourteenth century France. Geoffroi de Charny (d. 1356), was a well-thought-of knight. Perhaps in 1355, in Lirey, Charny began to exhibit what came to be known, centuries later, as the Shroud of Turin.

Most participants on most sides of the debate agree on the above. Those who argue for the Shroud being the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ cite centuries of evidence from historical documents and artifacts. Going back to Christianity's early centuries, commentators have recorded mentions of reverence for a piece of cloth that bore an image Christ. One such possible candidate for the Shroud is the Image of Edessa, which is first mentioned in the fourth or fifth century. Art history is replete with possible copies of such an image, copies that replicate multiple features of the image on the Shroud, including details not relevant to an image of a crucifixion. For example, the Shroud includes a pattern of l-shaped holes. The man on the Shroud crosses his hands, and his thumbs are not visible. Those three features appear in a twelfth-century image in the Hungarian Pray Codex. The Pray Codex is dated earlier than fourteenth-century, the proposed 1988 carbon date for the Shroud.

Ian Wilson, in his 2010 Bantam book The Shroud: The 2,000 Year Old Mystery Solved, presents a detailed argument for the Image of Edessa and the Turin Shroud to be one and the same. Edessa was once a Christian city in the Byzantine Empire. How could an image associated with Edessa have made its way to France? Edessa is now Sanliurfa, in Muslim Turkey. The theory is that the Image of Edessa, along with other relics, moved west after the Muslim Conquest.

The Muslim Conquest began in the seventh century. Muslims exerted genocidal pressure against Christians. In 1095, Pope Urban II commanded Christians living in Europe to aid Christians in the Middle East. "Your brethren who live in the east are in urgent need of your help …  the Turks and Arabs have attacked … they have killed and captured many, and have destroyed the churches and devastated the empire." Catholic Crusaders from western Europe made their way east. They soon discovered that there were considerable cultural differences between western and eastern Christians. By the time of the Fourth Crusade, western Christians felt manipulated and betrayed by Byzantines. In 1204, Crusaders, largely from Venice and France, sacked Constantinople. Several prominent Crusaders, including Simon de Montfort, refused to participate in this attack on fellow Christians. Pope Innocent III (1161 – 1216) excommunicated Crusaders for attacking fellow Christians. In 2001, Pope John Paul II apologized. "It is tragic that the assailants, who had set out to secure free access for Christians to the Holy Land, turned against their own brothers in the faith." The sack "fills Catholics with deep regret." Catholic crimes "still cause suffering to the spirit of" Orthodox Christians. "Together we must work for this healing if the Europe now emerging is to be true to its identity, which is inseparable from the Christian humanism shared by East and West." In other words, a united Christendom is more able to deal with secularization.

An old proverb observes, "It's an ill wind that blows no good." Even horrific events can have some positive outcome. A Muslim victory over Byzantium was probably inevitable. Hagia Sophia was consecrated in 360 AD. Hagia Sophia had been a Christian church for a millennium. In 1453, Muslims desecrated Hagia Sophia, and used it as a mosque. It is a mosque today. Had Muslims gotten hold of the Shroud, they would have destroyed it. Some who believe the Shroud to be authentic think it might have reached western Europe by way of Crusaders or others involved in the redistribution of Constantinople's purloined riches. See, for example, the bronze horses of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice. Those horses were among the booty Crusaders looted from Constantinople and brought back to their homes. In 1344, Charny had participated in the Smyrniote Crusades in what was then Smyrna, but what is now Izmir, Turkey. It's possible that Charny acquired the Shroud during his crusading, but no one knows for sure.

Those eager to learn more are encouraged to dive into Shroud.com, Shroud.com was begun by Barrie Schwortz in 1996. Schwortz was the documenting photographer of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project, or STURP. Schwortz passed away in 2024, and Shroud scholar Joe Marino is now editor. Shroud.com archives an exhaustive library of research on the Shroud.

Before I begin offering impressions of the SEEC conference, I'd like to let the reader know my POV on three key questions:

1. Authenticity. Doesn't the 1988 carbon dating prove the Shroud to be a fake?

2. Evangelization. If authentic, does the Shroud "prove" Christianity?

3. Nomenclature. How should we talk about the Shroud?

1. AUTHENTICITY. DOESN'T THE 1988 CARBON DATING PROVE THE SHROUD TO BE A FAKE?

After twenty years of exposing myself to research produced by credentialed scholars publishing in peer-reviewed publications, and many questions answered in conversation primarily with Barrie Schwortz but also with Shroud denouncers Michael Shermer and Joe Nickell, I have come to believe that the Shroud of Turin is most likely the burial cloth of Jesus. I am open to it being proven to be something else, but that proof has yet to appear.

In 1988, scientists reported that, based on their carbon dating, the Shroud dates from the fourteenth century. For many, hard science is the unimpeachable standard for truth. Hard science "locuta, causa finita." Science spoke; further discussion is precluded. 

Others have looked harder at the 1988 dating, and discovered numerous flaws. Type "1988 carbon dating" into the Shroud.com search box, and you will find hundreds of resources, many, again, from credentialed scholars.

Rather than summarizing others' research, all available above, I will offer my own reflection. Thanks to arrogance, politics, or tribalism, hard scientists have produced many a folly. In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis was an obstetrician at Vienna General Hospital. Semmelweis had been born in Hungary and he was of Jewish ancestry. Because of his ethnic identity, he was "relegated" to the "less desirable" obstetrics division. At that time, doctors did not habitually wash their hands between autopsies and attending to childbirths. Many women died. Semmelweis' research showed that thorough doctor hand-washing dramatically reduced maternal mortality. Doctors resisted this Jewish, Hungarian upstart. Women kept dying. Semmelweis had a breakdown. He was institutionalized and died at 47 – ironically, from an infection – after he was beaten in the psychiatric institution where he was confined.

The Shroud's full image had never really been seen until it was first photographed in 1898. Before that, viewers saw a vague beige smudge. Only the negative of Italian photographer Secondo Pia's first photograph revealed the detailed photograph-like image we can see today. Pia was immediately falsely accused of fraud. French anatomist Yves Delage (1854 – 1920), an agnostic, studied the Shroud and believed it to be authentic. The Lancet praised Delage: "Any idea of fraud need not be considered," and no medieval painter "had the skill" to produce the image on the Shroud. Delage attempted to present his research to the Academy of Sciences. He was suppressed and attacked. Delage's scientific team were accused of "intellectual ineptitude," "conspiracy," and being "seminarians disguised as scientists" engaging in "debauchery" that "justified reprisals." Delage and Pia both suffered because of these attacks, and so did scientific study of the Shroud. 

Such arrogance is not a relic of the distant past or far away lands. German Jesuit priest Friedrich Spee (1591 – 1635) is credited with being one of the earliest voices to advance a published, influential case against the use of torture in obtaining confessions in legal cases. Spee witnessed the misuse of torture during the witch craze. Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker and former Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer, two of our most prominent scientific proponents of atheism as the route to higher ethics, slander Spee to advance their own "atheism is ethical / Christianity is wicked" agenda. Both Shermer and Pinker, in recent bestsellers, lie about Spee. Their falsehood is now on the Wikipedia page for Friedrich Spee. I have written to Pinker, Shermer, and their publishers about this, to no avail. The letter is here.

My point is not that all scientists and/or atheists suppress the truth and lie and destroy others' careers to advance their ideology. Rather, the moral of these tales is this: hold scientists up to scientific criteria.

In 1988, Shroud carbon dater Edward Hall did not exemplify the disinterestedness required of a researcher. He was a "contemptuous" "avowed atheist" who stood to gain financially and in his career from his carbon dating of the Shroud. When asked how the Shroud came to be made in medieval France, Hall said, "Someone just got a bit of linen, faked it up and flogged it." Hall referred to anyone who questioned his carbon dating as a "flat-earther." Hall did not "shy from exploiting his laboratory's 'success' in its work on the Shroud in order to raise £1 million pounds to found the Edward Hall Chair in Archaeological Science."

Hall violated scientific standards in ignoring data that contradicted his conclusion. Hall once said that archaeologists "should never find themselves in a position where a key argument or interpretation is based on a single measuring technique which cannot be cross-checked." Hall did exactly that in relation to the Shroud, and so does every Shroud critic since Hall who takes a "hard science has spoken; the matter is closed" approach. Ignoring as plethora of data from multiple disciplines is not respectable in any search for truth. It is obscurantist.

Hall believed "that the image had probably been made by heating a metal statue, then applying it to the linen branding-iron-style." But science had disproven that theory years before. Barrie Schwortz writes,

"The Shroud was heavily damaged  by a fire … there were plenty of documented reference scorches on the cloth for us to compare to. Scorched linen will fluoresce red under ultraviolet excitation, so we photographed the entire Shroud using ultraviolet fluorescence photography ... every known scorch fluoresced in the red … the image itself did not fluoresce … we proved that the image is not a scorch."

Further, Hall ignored results produced by the many medical professionals who believe the Shroud accurately to depict a death from crucifixion. See an extensive list of those doctors at "Individual Medical Doctors' Viewpoints on the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin" by Joe Marino. One of those doctors, Robert Bucklin, says, "I have personally examined over 25,000 bodies by autopsy to determine the cause and manner of death," and "If I were asked in a court of law to stake my professional reputation on the validity of the Shroud of Turin, I would answer very positively and firmly that it’s the burial cloth of Christ—and that it is Jesus whose figure appears on the Shroud."

The humanities and the social sciences demonstrate that human expressive culture follows rules just as surely as carbon decay follows rules. Suppose an art history scholar were to discover, in an Egyptian tomb that had been sealed for the past five thousand years, a work of art that followed the aesthetic prescriptions of Andy Warhol's 20th century American portrait of Marilyn Monroe. Hard scientists might argue that ancient Egyptians possessed the technology necessary to produce such items of expressive culture. Ancient Egyptians had pigments; they had surfaces on which to draw. An art history scholar would find such an attitude bizarre. Of course the ancient Egyptians could produce Warhol-like art. The fact is, though, that they never did. Ancient Egyptians, like all artists everywhere, followed the artistic mandates of their time and place. The Shroud defies the claim that the 1988 dating "solves" the mystery as much as would be an isolated pharaonic Warhol, or a rock song composed during the period of Gregorian Chant, or a Nampeyo vase popping up in a Slovak village during the high point of peasant embroidery.

Project yourself back into mid-fourteenth-century Lirey, France, the time when Hall insisted the Shroud was "faked up." At that time, France was fighting the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) with England. Shortly after the start of that war, France suffered from the plague between the years 1347 and 1352. Half the population of Paris died.

Lirey was a tiny, agrarian, feudal village, about one hundred miles from Paris, and home to perhaps one hundred residents. Most of the population were serfs or other peasants. Life expectancy was 33 years. The Renaissance had yet to begin in France. The Gothic style dominated. Gothic artists emphasized the spiritual, not the biological or the anatomical. Gothic artists generally did not depict realistic musculature, blood flows, and, certainly not realistic nudity. In Gothic art, bodies are often shaped like straight up and down columns, arms are outlined with straight lines, even over biceps. Faces are often stoic. These features of Gothic art often render it impenetrable or even comic to modern eyes; see "Medieval Art Memes" here. The Shroud is utterly unlike these examples.

Charny fought in both the Crusades and the Hundred Years' War. Charny, in his drafty manor house, and his serfs in their primitive huts, experienced no such thing as privacy. No rogue innovator could escape others' prying eyes and create and practice whatever advanced procedure, that would have required several steps, to create the Shroud. Several steps would have been required because, for example, there is no image beneath the blood on the Shroud. This medieval innovator would have had to apply blood first, and then create the ghostly image around the blood.

Creation of the image presents new problems. It is so faint it is not visible except to those standing several feet away from the Shroud. You stand closer up, and the image disappears. And the image is so superficial it almost does not exist. The image is created by the so-far unexplained darkening of linen fibrils that are one-fifth the width of a human hair. Each fibril is equally discolored. The image changes in intensity not because of a difference in the darkness of a given fibril, but because of the number of discolored fibrils in a given area. Analysis in 1976 revealed for the first time that the Shroud is encoded with 3-D information. In 1978, STURP discovered serum halos around the Shroud's blood stains. No one today has been able to recreate the Shroud, or even explain how it was made. In the midst of medieval mayhem and misery, plague and war, someone, as Hall insists, "faked up" the Shroud of Turin. Hall advances no evidence to support this implausible claim. 

It is a commandment of scholarship: thou shalt not pontificate outside of thine own discipline. Hall violated this scholarly commandment with his "faking it up and flogging it" pronouncement. When addressing items of expressive culture, humanities scholars must answer: who, what, when, where, why, how. Hall can do none of these.

A Clovis point is a Pleistocene-era projectile point made in North America up to 13,500 years ago. I once stumbled upon a Clovis point in some disrupted dirt at the edge of a K-Mart parking lot. I visited an anthropologist at Indiana University. He answered my every question: who made the artifact, when, where, why, what it was made of and how it was made and used. In fact a scholar, given a piece of chert, jasper, chalcedony, or obsidian, and a deer antler for knapping, can make a Clovis point while-you-wait. We don't have to guess how Clovis points were used – they've been found embedded in game animals like mammoths.

Can Edward Hall answer basic who, what, when, where, why, and how questions regarding the Shroud? Heck no. Let's look only at the "why" question – a question that the humanities, not the hard sciences, best addresses.

Reformers like Erasmus and Luther expressed open contempt at the gullibility of the relic market. They reported that bones that were obviously animal in origin were treated as if the bones of a dead saint. We know of several relics from fourteenth-century France; some of these still exist. They include the crown of thorns, a fragment of the true cross, a nail from the crucifixion, a piece of cloth said to have been worn by Mary, a bone from the head of St. John the Baptist, and a strand of Mary's hair. Sellers did not go to great effort to alter the appearance of these items. More important was the provenance, as related in a believable narrative. Someone trusted by a powerful person said some version of the following: "I got this strand of hair from a Crusader who got it from the church in Constantinople [or Jerusalem or Rome] where it has been kept for the past thirteen hundred years."

Another relic, the Sudarium of Oviedo, is a blood-stained linen cloth, 33 by 21 inches. It has traditionally been described as a cloth that once wrapped Jesus' face after crucifixion. Unlike the Shroud, the Sudarium is not visually sophisticated or mysterious. It is, simply, a cloth with blood on it. Again, unlike the Shroud, the Sudarium comes with a sophisticated narrative of provenance. According to Pelagius of Oviedo, a twelfth-century bishop, who may or may not be have been telling the truth, the Sudarium left Israel with refugees after an attack by Persia. The Sudarium, as summarized by Mark Guscin,

"was taken away to avoid destruction in the invasion, first to Alexandria by the presbyter Philip, then across the north of Africa … The sudarium entered Spain at Cartagena, along with people who were fleeing from the Persians. The bishop of Ecija, Fulgentius, welcomed the refugees and the relics, and surrendered the chest, or ark, to Leandro, bishop of Seville. He took it to Seville, where it spent some years. Saint Isidore was later bishop of Seville, and teacher of Saint Ildefonso, who was in turn appointed bishop of Toledo. When he left Seville to take up his post there, he took the chest with him. It stayed in Toledo until the year 718. It was then taken further north to avoid destruction at the hands of the Muslims, who conquered the majority of the Iberian peninsula at the beginning of the eighth century. It was first kept in a cave that is now called Monsacro, ten kilometres from Oviedo … "

We can't know if this story is true, but we can recognize that it matches known history. Real or invented, it was provenance narratives like this, rather than visual sophistication, that, for the devout, sealed the authenticity of medieval relics.

The Shroud is unlike other, well-known, fourteenth-century French relics. Its complexity is overwhelming, and there is no convincing contemporary provenance narrative to accompany it.

An anthropologist can answer the "why" question of a 13,500-year-old Clovis point. The Edward Hall camp must answer: why would a forger resort to an image that would so weirdly mimic photography, a technology that did not exist and could not be seen in the Middle Ages? Why create an image without color, when color was so important in Medieval art – see, for example, illuminated manuscripts – given that this art was produced by and for people toiling, as they did, in often dark, dingy, dirty, smoky interiors much less colorful than our own?

The Shroud not only does not follow the laws of the expressive culture of medieval relics, it defies them. Blood is shown flowing from the man's wrist, not his hands. It is standard in Christian iconography and speech as well to depict and describe Jesus' hands, not his wrists, as having been pierced by nails.

The Shroud man is naked. Christian modesty decrees that we always include a loin cloth in artistic representations. This requirement is so strong that in a 1578 woodcut copy of the Shroud, "The Holy Shroud of Our Lord Jesus Christ," the artist places a loin cloth on the Shroud man. Willem De Haen, in the seventeenth century, also places a loin cloth on his Shroud man. These works and many others, by professional artists attempting to copy the Shroud, and failing dramatically at doing so, demonstrate that artists of the past could not replicate the Shroud's many unique features, but they probably didn't even feel any need to do so. These flawed attempts by artists to recreate the Shroud argue against the Shroud as an item of expressive culture.

The scourge marks on the Shroud do not match those in medieval art, or in artists' attempts to copy the Shroud. Those attempting to copy the Shroud had no idea how accurate those scourge marks were. Compare the Shroud to Duccio di Buoninsegna's "Flagellation" here, Cimabue's here, or Guido da Siena's here. Scourge marks on the Shroud do match the Roman flagrum, a weapon unfamiliar to the medieval world, but rediscovered by digs in the eighteenth century. Why would a forger defy hegemonic iconography? Anyone who wishes to prove a medieval origin for the Shroud must answer that question, and others, for example the following.

Items of expressive culture are not found in isolation. They are not found without evidence of practice. If one excavates an ancient site and finds one pot, one finds other pots like it, and the remains of failed or broken pots in middens. If the Shroud is a forgery, where are its precedents? Where are the other forged shrouds like it? Where is there evidence of practice shrouds of this type? If the technology to create the Shroud was available in medieval Europe, where are other products of this technology? Humankind is an exhaustively exploitative species. We make full use of any technology we discover, and leave ample evidence of that use. Given the lucrative nature of the forgery market, why didn't the forger create a similar Shroud of Mary, Shroud of St. Peter, Shroud of St. Paul, etc.? And why didn't followers do the same? No one who can't answer all these questions is qualified to pontificate that "someone just got a bit of linen, faked it up, and flogged it."

2. EVANGELIZATION. IF AUTHENTIC, DOES THE SHROUD "PROVE" CHRISTIANITY?

Some invite others to contemplate the Shroud and thereby become Christians. I am not in that camp. I hope that people come to Christianity through the church, through the scriptures, and through Jesus. "Preach always; use words when necessary," is an old saying. Christians attract others to Christ by living out Christ's example. Even if new carbon dating dated the Shroud to 2,000 years before present, those who reject Christ would still reject the Shroud. They would say that someone "faked it up and flogged it" 2,000 years ago.

Yves Delage  was an agnostic. Barrie Schwortz was Jewish. British art historian Thomas de Wesselow is an agnostic. All have advanced convincing arguments for the Shroud's authenticity. They believe that the Shroud was produced through some natural process. They may be correct. Belief in the Shroud does not equal belief in Jesus as Christ.

3. NOMENCLATURE. HOW SHOULD WE TALK ABOUT THE SHROUD?

Some may hear Edward Hall's "faked it up and flogged it" and "flat-earther" comments as the self-indulgence of an upper class Brit born with a sliver spoon in his mouth, or the impatience of a truth-seeker tilting at a shameless hoax. Ask yourself. Would the press repeat with so much gleeful approval similar scorn about a Muslim or Buddhist relic and the scholars and scholarship devoted to it? Islam's Kaaba, say? No. Christians are mocked; others are respected. There is a reason for that dichotomy.

My family roots are in Poland and Slovakia. I met a Slovak priest who had been tortured almost to death by Communists. In Poland in 1989 I watched priests risk their lives in stand-offs with Communist riot police. I am mindful of the hundreds of thousands of Christian clergy, nuns, and devout lay people murdered by Communists and Nazis. I worked in the Central African Republic where, in 2013, Muslims attempted what the UN warned might become a "genocide" of Christians. No, Hall is not guilty of mass murder. But his unscientific contempt is one somewhat less toxic branch of a deadly tree – Christophobia.

I've spent most of my adult life on university campuses. I have seen applicants for tenure-track jobs rejected because they are Christian. I have helped students who face relentless harassment from their professors because they, the students, are Christian. I have attended staff meetings that include mockery of Christian students. I have seen major historical events, including the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the witch craze, and Nazism distorted in order to discredit Christianity. This in spite of recent scholarship by, inter alia, Henry Kamen, Tom Holland, and Rodney Stark, attempting to correct falsehoods. For my own response to the attempt to use the witch craze and Nazism to discredit Christianity, see here and here. Conversely, my students have been completely unaware of the fact that Communism kills. When I tell them that by one estimate, atheistic Communist regimes were responsible for one hundred million deaths, they are shocked. Students are also shocked to learn that professors who tell them that non-Western cultures are all peaceful and egalitarian are not telling the truth. Islamic jihad, the violence and hate of the Hindu caste system, Confucianism's comfort with female infanticide, Zen Buddhism's role in Imperial Japan, all shock them.

Saul Alinsky's twelfth rule for radicals was "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Others have picked Christians as the target. They have frozen us in stereotypes. We are obscurantists; we hate science; we imprison Galileo. In July, 2025, Cicero Morares, a Brazilian designer, published a study insisting that the Shroud is a medieval work of art. In response to a news article covering Morares' work, an anonymous poster wrote, "I mean, if theists believe that a flood covered the whole planet and dinosaurs lived a few thousand years ago, there's no point approaching them with any sort of rational argument on anything." This person knows that Christians are too stupid and obscurantist for inclusion in civilized discourse. No doubt this poster is unaware that the Catholic Church is credited with a key role in the invention of the university. This poster has never read physicist Scott Locklin's brief history, "No Catholic Church, No Scientific Method."

Those of us so targeted have yet to adopt the Alinsky-ian approach of freezing and personalizing our opponent – Christophobia. Some Christophobic zealots are Marxists; some are motivated by competing religious identifications; some are too arrogant to acknowledge that there is a force in the universe greater than themselves. Diverse people with diverse motivations are united in their hostility to and stereotyping of us, and, as part of our effort to communicate truth, we need to follow Saul Alinsky's prescription when addressing their distortions of truth. We need to name their agenda – Christophobia – and their approach – blind zealotry – when interacting with them. Not all Shroud opponents are Christophobic zealots, and legitimate criticism of the Shroud deserves our respect. But when even a serious scholar writes us all off as "flat-earthers," the term "Christophobic zealot" clearly applies.

Back to the SEEC conference. My three favorite presentations were by Pam Moon, Russ Breault, and Jeremiah Johnston. These three presenters were polished, professional, and well-organized. 

Pam Moon was a charming, soft-spoken, English-accented presenter. Her goal was to present a plausible and supported record of the Shroud's existence before the Lirey exhibition. She used evidence from historical documents. You can read a paper by Pam Moon here. "An Examination of Art Created in the 10th Century in Constantinople; The Mystery of the Narthex Mosaic, and the Shroud of Turin" offers support for the theory that what came to be known as the Shroud of Turin previously existed as the Image of Edessa in Byzantium. "The Folding Patterns of the Shroud of Turin" examines evidence of folding, evidence of damage to the Shroud when it was folded in a certain position, and relates the folding and the damage to possible dates, places, and storage customs. Moon adds, "For those who believe the Shroud is a medieval artistic creation, the folding patterns cause a significant problem because there is no traceable history for much of the damage in the later Middle Ages." A very thorough, fully illustrated 2024 interview with Pam Moon can be found on YouTube, here.

Russ Breault is a charismatic pro. He has presented on the Shroud to major institutions and the national media. In spite of his success, he is warm and approachable and speaks with fresh enthusiasm. Breault powerfully combines scholarship and a commitment to communicating complex ideas to average folk. Breault's website is here. The Amazon page for a 2024 Breault book is here. You can catch a Breault presentation on YouTube here.

Jeremiah J. Johnston is a pastor, and he uses technology to bring the Shroud to young people. You can see a presentation by Dr. Johnston on YouTube, here.

I was very positively impressed by Kelly P. Kearse's presentation. Dr. Kearse's research contradicts previous conclusions about the blood on the Shroud. Dr. Kearse referred to scientific analysis methods that would be unfamiliar to most listeners, but he did so in a way that could be understood by the average person. Kearse said things that many might not want to hear, and he deserves credit for his courage and his honesty. One can read his contributions here at Shroud.com, and watch an interview with Kearse here.

I was thrilled to hear a talk by John Jackson. Dr. Jackson is the physicist who lead the 1978 STURP research team. As one might expect from a physicist, Dr. Jackson's talk was replete with charts, graphs, and minute details. Dr. Jackson asked that we not talk about the content of his talk because it is new research, and, as yet, unpublished. Dr. Jackson has made his review, The Shroud of Turin: A Critical Summary of Observations, Data and Hypotheses free and available to the public here. Dr. Jackson's wife, Rebecca Jackson, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew, gave a talk on how understanding of ancient Jewish burial practices illuminates study of the Shroud.

In 2019, historian Tristan Casabianca and his colleagues published, in Archaeometry, "Radiocarbon Dating of the Turin Shroud: New Evidence from Raw Data." Their research exposed hitherto hidden irregularities in the 1988 carbon dating. They write,

"The measurements made by the three laboratories on the TS [Turin Shroud] sample suffer from a lack of precision which seriously affects the reliability of the 95% AD 1260–1390 interval. The statistical analyses, supported by the foreign material found by the laboratories, show the necessity of a new radiocarbon dating to compute a new reliable interval. This new test requires, in an interdisciplinary research, a robust protocol. Without this re-analysis, it is not possible to affirm that the 1988 radiocarbon dating offers ‘conclusive evidence’ that the calendar age range is accurate and representative of the whole cloth."

Attorney and author Mark Antonacci also argued for retesting of the Shroud.

Dr. Gilbert Lavoie is a physician and the author of the 2023 book, The Shroud of Jesus and the Sign John Ingeniously Concealed. Dr. Lavoie argued that the Shroud depicts an upright man.

I'm no physicist, but I was charmed by Robert A. Rucker's speaking style, even though I am unqualified to summarize his talk. His website offers this summary of his main idea,

"Plotting the average values from the three [carbon dating] laboratories indicates there is a gradient or slope to the carbon dates from the three laboratories of about 36 years per cm of distance from the bottom of the Shroud. This indicates that something altered the date measurements as a function of (depending on) the distance of the original location of the samples from the bottom of the cloth. Nuclear analysis computer calculations indicate this slope in the carbon dates is about the same as would result from new C14 produced on the Shroud by neutron absorption resulting from the distribution of neutrons in the tomb if they were emitted from within the body."

Pedro Peinado from Oviedo, Spain, used mathematical modeling and animation to create a 3-D image of a proposed head that matches both the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo. You can see a talk with Dr. Peinado here. The Sudarium has been housed in Oviedo at least since 840. If the Shroud and the Sudarium covered the same blood-stained head, that demonstrates that the 1988 carbon dating is incorrect.

After the conclusion of the conference, attendees were surveyed. Five-out-of-five-star ratings predominated. The conference organizers, speakers, funders, attendees, and volunteers are to be applauded. The hotel side of the Augustine Institute was staffed by Catholic graduate students. Their courtesy, good cheer, and patience demonstrated the proverb, "Preach always; use words if necessary."

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.