Tomb Raider of Lost Arks and More

Rag and Bone

A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead

By Peter Manseau

Henry Holt & Company. 243 pp. $25

You might be confident that the risen Christ is the Messiah, but would you be more so if you could venerate a piece of his remains: his foreskin, for example? Peter Manseau's "Rag and Bone," a travelogue in which the author details his search for body parts of the holy deceased, tackles the curious relationship between faith and the physical evidence relics offer. "A relic concentrates the beliefs surrounding it until they can be seen . . . like shining sunlight through a magnifying glass," Manseau writes of his pilgrimages to view bits of the departed, including Muhammad's whisker in Kashmir, one of the Buddha's teeth in Sri Lanka and Jesus' prepuce in Jerusalem.

Of course, there's a lot of room for the word "alleged" when scrutinizing remains over two millennia old, but aside from a chapter devoted to a researcher trying to determine whether a scorched human rib found in a French museum belonged to Joan of Arc, Manseau is less interested in the legitimacy of relics than in how people use them to support belief. Christianity, Islam and Buddhism thrive by convincing the uninitiated that dogma preached by long-dead figureheads is universal truth. As the author points out, what better "portable form of sanctity" is there for evangelicals than St. Francis Xavier's toe, Lama Yeshe's leg or St. Anthony's tongue?

Born to a former nun and a priest who married but refused to renounce the Church, Manseau brings the same expansive perspective on belief to "Rag and Bone" that fueled his 2005 memoir, "Vows" -- the understanding that every leap of faith can benefit from a little push.

-- Justin Moyer