The Match: Stay Calm - a novella written by David Charles Kramer
The Match: Stay Calm David Charles Kramer I. Rome Dr. Adrian Mercer believed in Jesus Christ. He did not believe in the Shroud of Turin. For most of his adult life, those facts had coexisted peacefully. Mercer had never understood why anyone expected otherwise. Faith, as he understood it, was not an archaeological scavenger hunt. He did not require ancient linen, blood chemistry, pollen grains, splinters of wood, iron nails, empty tombs, or laboratory instruments to certify the Resurrection. If anything, relics made him nervous. Give human beings an object they desperately wanted to be holy and, sooner or later, somebody would ask science to perform theology. Science was terrible at theology. Mercer knew because he had spent twenty-seven years practicing science. At fifty, he was a molecular geneticist specializing in degraded DNA, contamination analysis, and historical genomics. His official work involved difficult samples. His unofficial specialty was dis...