Word: relics
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...comes?" asks Walton. Shadoan thinks the trend in tort law-toward no-fault auto, product liability and medical malpractice insurance-may block that next step. He points to Great Britain, where "if you get raped, you get medical care and a government payment. Damage suits will soon be a relic of the past." Many lawyers are betting it will never happen...
...Catholics, who will henceforth be allowed to choose between old-fashioned anonymous confession and the new face-to-face-style sacrament. While it will remain an option, as will the modified form of a screen set in an open room, the traditional cramped confessional box could gradually become a relic...
...this area of reliquaries one realizes most vividly how church practice, including art, has changed across the centuries. What were once objects of universal veneration are now, to most people, oddities. The less intrinsically dignified the relic, the truer this seems to be. One cannot re-experience the feelings with which a devout Roman borghese of the 17th century might have knelt before the reliquary of Mary Magdalene's foot in the church of Sts. Celsus and Julian. To him it would have been an object dense in its reality and hallowed in association: one of the actual feet...
...reliquary has no such value. We do not know whether the wizened and musty tissue that presumably lies inside the silver casing was ever attached to a historical personage named Mary Magdalene. The odds are against it, since the relic has no written history older than the 17th century. Instead, the quasi-magical object has become a fine piece of mannerist silverware, culturally almost as distant from us as an African nail fetish...
...example of it in "Treasures of Sacred Art" is a 16th century reliquary from the Collegiate Church of Calcata, north of Rome. Two elegantly slim silver-gilt angels hold up a casket surmounted by a crown, studded with rubies and emeralds. It is traditionally believed to contain the only relic left on earth by Jesus Christ. True, Christ ascended bodily into heaven before the eyes of the astonished Apostles after his resurrection. But he had been circumcised in the temple as an infant, and the Holy Foreskin, preserved by a succession of devout guardians, is said to have found...