Fifth Graders and the Shroud of Turin
The school is a mystery, at least from a quick look at the blog. But this blog from teachers at the school seems to be the main method by which teachers communicate with parents. Here is an extract from a recent posting:
From Mrs. Brown: Your 5th grader has been given an intriguing assignment: decide if he/she believes if the Shroud of Turin is really the burial cloth of Christ, or a hoax. I’ve given the students a brief description of the Shroud, with some opinions for and against its authenticity. In class, we’re watching "The Real Face of Jesus" DVD from the History Channel. That’s just the starting point! I’d like your child, with your help, to do some research on-line to gather more information on the Shroud. Based on this research, I’d like your child to state his/her opinion about the Shroud and then fill in the chart (which will come home on Thursday, March 18) with three compelling reasons for his/her opinion, along with three subpoints under each reason. The subpoints must be related to the reason. We will use this as the basis for writing the opinion paper. Completed chart is due Tuesday, March 22nd.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
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