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It was the beginning of summer and nearly 100 degrees out when I found myself taking the the three-mile trek to Faleria, the closest thing the area has to civilization from Calcata. Calcata, a village about 30 miles north of Rome, has a small handful of stores: an ethnic shop that sells everything from African clothes to candles; a wooden box shop; a hat shop; and several art galleries. Thanks to the hippies and artists who make up Calcata's population, if I wanted a sari or a turban or some incense, I'd only need to walk about fifty steps from my apartment. But if I needed something useful like, say, food, I'd have to walk for a while.   

I'd planned to stay in Calcata about a year while researching a book about the village relic that had gone missing (many said "stolen"), the Holy Foreskin (yes, that would be the foreskin of Jesus). And I was a week into my tenure when I'd gone to the not-so-super market in the new village of Calata Nuova (a 10 minute walk away) and went crazy when I saw they had cans of my favorite soup, Zuppa di Ceci (Chickpea soup). I rushed home, anxious to pop open a can; I got out a sauce pot, a bowl, and a spoon. I just had to open it. I scoured the corner of the main room that is the kitchen; a can opener was nowhere to be found. 

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"Seen this yet?" was the subject line of an email from my friend John in London. It was a link to a story in the Guardian. John always sends me intriguing links (such as YouTube videos of robots dancing to James Brown songs), so I figured whatever it was had to be good. But I wasn't expecting this.

The headline of the Guardian article: "Beyond Belief."  According to the article, written by staff reporter Stuart Jeffries, archeologists were digging around the famed Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem, the spot where people believe Christ ascended into heaven, and found a white stone cross. And there they also made another discovery: the Holy Foreskin. In Jerusalem.

When I read this my jaw-dropped. I was halfway through writing An Irreverent Curiosity and had come to my own conclusions about what happened to the Holy Foreskin-and those conclusions were far, far away from Jerusalem. My first instinct, of course, was to start looking up airfares to Jerusalem and look at my calendar to see if I'm free to travel next week. I actually wasn't. I had to teach a class.

So, instead of packing my bags for Jerusalem, I started doing a little research. Who were these archeologists and who were Stuart Jeffries' sources? I was going to have to talk them. The reports on this Holy Foreskin discovery were reported in a publication called Judaistic Review which was picked up from one organization and one "journalist" in particular: Mitch Ugana from a publication called African New Dimension.

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I hadn't planned to be in Bruges-Belgium's most picturesque town-on its busiest day of the year, but there I was, traipsing through the narrow spectator flanked streets. Everyone was waiting for the star attraction. It wasn't a celebrity or a politician that would be parading by. It was something much more endearing to the people of this Gothic-clad city: it was the blood of Jesus.

It was May 21, the day of the annual procession of the "Heilig Bloed." Though drops of Jesus' blood were sprinkled around Europe, Bruges was the best-known claimant. The locals began an annual procession with the Holy Blood after the Belgian city was saved from the marauding French, which began in 1203 and has lasted into the twenty-first century. Because the blood would liquefy for the faithful every Friday, Pope Clement V gave his official stamp of approval on the Bruges blood in 1310 with an indulgence-a remission of temporal punishment due for sins that have already been forgiven-to those who came to venerate it (after an unnamed blasphemy occurred later that year the blood became stubborn and refused to perform its weekly trick, only liquefying once more in 1388).

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David Farley is our guest blogger during the week of July 13th If you have any questions for David Farley, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information on An Irreverent Curiosity:

A tour through the centuries and through a bizarre Italian town in search of an unbelievable relic: the foreskin of Jesus Christ

In December 1983, a priest in the Italian hill town of Calcata shared shocking news with his congregation: The pride of their town, the foreskin of Jesus, had been stolen. Some postulated that it had been stolen by Satanists. Some said the priest himself was to blame. Some even pointed their fingers at the Vatican. In 2006, travel writer David Farley moved to Calcata, determined to find the missing foreskin, or at least find out the truth behind its disappearance. Farley recounts how the relic passed from Charlemagne to the papacy to a marauding sixteenth-century German solider before finally ending up in Calcata, where miracles occurred that made the sleepy town a major pilgrimage destination. Over the centuries, as Catholic theology evolved, the relic came to be viewed as something of an embarrassment, culminating in a 1900 Church decree that allowed the parish to display it only on New Year's Day.

An Irreverent Curiosity interweaves this history with the curious landscape of Calcata, a beautiful and untouched medieval village set atop four-hundred-fifty-foot cliffs, which now, due to the inscrutable machinations of Italian bureaucracy, is a veritable counterculture coven. Blending history, travel, and perhaps the oddest story in Christian lore, An Irreverent Curiosity is a weird and wonderful tale of conspiracy and misadventure.