Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead Book

A fascinating, intelligent, and sometimes funny tour of the human relics at the root of the world’s major religions

By examining relics—the bits and pieces of long-dead saints at the heart of nearly all religious traditions—Peter Manseau delivers a book about life, and about faith and how it is sustained. The result of wide travel and the author’s own deep curiosity, filled with true tales of the living and dubious legends of the dead, Rag and Bone tells of a California seeker who ended up in a Jerusalem convent because of a nun’s disembodied hand; a French forensics expert who travels on the metro with the rib of a saint; two young brothers who collect tickets at a Syrian mosque, studying English beside a hair from the Prophet Muhammad’s beard; and many other stories, myths, and peculiar histories.

With these, and an array of other digits, limbs, and bones, Manseau provides a respectful, witty, informed, inquisitive, thoughtful, and fascinating look into the "primordial strangeness that is at the heart of belief," and the place where the abstractions of faith meet the realities of physical objects, of rags and bones.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Watching an ultrasound of his unborn daughter swimming in the dark soup of the womb offered Peter Manseau more than just a glimpse of the infant soon to make her way into his arms. It put him on the road to another discovery. These bones are where belief begins, he mused seeing the baby s tiny limbs. And so began his wondrous journey to teach her, that faith is strange and beautiful and sometimes scary, by way of exploring the stories behind a diverse collection of sacred relics the world over. Relics, those fragments of flesh, bone, or fabric believed to be taken from the holiest people to walk the earth, have been revered for thousands of years by the faithful of many religions. According to Manseau s vivid descriptions, they are indeed as strange, beautiful (and sometimes downright scary) as the faiths that preserve them. From the Catholics prodigious and peculiar assortment including the purported prepuce of Jesus (which he did not actually view) and the chewed piece of licorice said to be the tongue of St. Anthony (which he and hundreds of others stood in line for hours to see), to a surreal traveling Buddhist reliquary, on to Kashmir s most sacred Muslim treasure: Prophet Muhammad s chin whisker, and others, Manseau s unerring eye for detail makes for a fascinating travelogue. But it s more than that. Drawing on history, spiritual traditions, legend and contemporary reports, this book is a totally exuberant compendium of human beliefs, certain to satisfy devotees of all stripes, because [relics] make explicit what we all know in our own bones: that bodies tell stories; that the transformation offered by faith is not just about, as the Gospels put it, the word made flesh, but the flesh made word. --Lydia Dishman