Tea at Trianon: Science-driven Documentary on the Shroud of Turin

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, August 6, 2023

Science-driven Documentary on the Shroud of Turin

From Catholic News Agency:

In 1988, carbon-dating tests concluded the Shroud of Turin was a 700-year-old fake. Thirty-five years later, 21st-century science is pointing to a dramatically different conclusion. The carbon tests overseen by the British Museum and Oxford University have since been discredited. For reasons not fully explained, researchers analyzed only a small fiber sample taken from an edge of the shroud that was damaged in a fire in 1532 and mended by Poor Clare nuns using dyes.

Meanwhile, ever more sophisticated tests of the cloth’s pollen, bloodstains, and its perfect three-dimensional imagery are producing mounting evidence that the Shroud of Turin was created in the first century by a “nuclear event” that can’t be replicated by today’s technology. Filmmaker Robert Orlando dives into the middle of the debate over the shroud’s origins and authenticity with a new documentary, “The Shroud: Face to Face,” set for release in November. Orlando, who has written a book by the same title, frames his subject as a contemporary “true crime” investigation, employing recreated scenes and edgy visual effects to give the film an artsy vibe.

The film features interviews with experts from both sides of the debate, including American historian and Princeton Theological Seminary professor Dale Allison, Cheryl White of the Shroud of Turin Education and Research Association, and Mark Goodacre, television director, New Testament scholar, and professor at Duke University’s Department of Religion. Father Andrew Dalton, LC, STD, professor of theology at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome, who wrote the foreword for Orlando’s book, also appears in the film, as does Father Robert J. Spitzer, SJ, the Jesuit scholar, author, and popular EWTN television host. On Friday night, July 28, Spitzer joined Orlando for a 15-minute sneak peek of the film followed by a question-and-answer session during the Napa Institute’s annual summer conference in Napa, California. Spitzer is the institute’s president and co-founder.

“It’s more than a documentary in the sense that it engages everything: the aesthetic sense, the excitement of the investigation, the multimedia, all the senses,” Spitzer said of the film. (Read more.)

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