(RNS1-OCT08) Peter Manseau is the author of the new book, “Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead.” For use with RNS-10-MINUTES, transmitted April 1, 2009. Religion News Service photo courtesy Peter Manseau.

(UNDATED) Four years ago, Peter Manseau gazed at the first ultrasound pictures of what would months later be his first-born daughter, and thought of … dead saints.

Manseau, now 34, was deep into research for his newest book, “Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead.” He had roamed the world in search of the revered remains of Christian, Muslim and Buddhist paragons: to Italy for the tongue of St. Anthony; to Kashmir for a hair from Muhammad’s beard; and to the Temple of the Holy Tooth (the Buddha’s) in Sri Lanka, eventually cataloguing enough sacred bits to constitute a whole — if religiously piebald — human being.

Watching his own daughter-to-be swim in and out of focus, he experienced a renewed assurance that “bodies tell stories” and that “the transformation by faith is not just about … The `Word made flesh,’ but the flesh made word.”

“Rag and Bone” hits stores on Wednesday (April 1). Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How many heads of John the Baptist are there out there, and does it matter?

A: I’ve visited two, in Istanbul and Damascus. There’s a rumor of another in Greece. I don’t think it matters which is the real thing — if any of them are. Each has been the focus of devotion for so long that its religious significance transcends its “authenticity.” If challenged with the fact of other skulls, they would probably say, “All I know is that our community has always regarded this as holy, and so it is.”

Q: Your father was a Catholic priest and your mother was a nun, so your Catholic background must have exposed you to relics.

A: Actually, in post-Vatican II suburban America, they were considered an irrelevant part of our faith’s dark history. But I’ve always been drawn to hidden histories, and I discovered that even in every bland suburban church there was always a relic in the altar performing the function of sanctifying the space.

Q: Which faiths have a tradition of relics?

A: Christianity, Buddhism and Islam all do, while Judaism and Hinduism do not — primarily because of a belief that dead bodies are impure. Within Christianity, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy do, but Protestantism doesn’t. In Islam, the Shiites venerate relics, and the Sunni do not.

Q: Their Christian heyday was the Middle Ages.

A: Yes. When Christianity attained its greatest political power, relics did too. Kings’ reputations depended on them, monasteries were founded around them, and their pilgrimage routes were the continent’s highways. Their retrieval from Jerusalem, which was sort of the ultimate reliquary, was one cause of the Crusades. They became a kind of trans-national currency.

Q: What’s your favorite relic theft?

A: Probably the English bishop who bit off the finger of the 1,200-year-old remains of St. Mary Magdalene while pretending to kiss it. He hid it in his mouth before installing it in his own monastery.

Q: Relics can attract real violence.

A: Yes, but usually after they take on political meaning. I visited the shrine to the Buddha’s Tooth in Sri Lanka. It had been claimed by successive kings and then become a symbol of Sri Lanka’s independence from Britain. Ten years ago, it was suicide-bombed by Tamil Tigers rebels. It wasn’t religious: the tooth had become the national symbol of a state from which they wanted to secede.

Q: What is a prepuce, and what theological problems did Jesus’ pose?

A: A prepuce is another word or a foreskin. Several prepuces alleged to be Jesus’ turned up as relics. The problem was that when Jesus ascended to heaven, he went up complete in his humanity; anything less would compromise the human aspect of his nature. One proposed solution was that the foreskin flew after him like a little bird. Another was that it became one of Saturn’s rings. Nevertheless, prepuces purporting to be Jesus’ served several Christian kings as fertility tokens.

Q: Most of these religions have concepts of a soul in the afterlife. Why make such a big deal about the earthly remains?

A: I think that the idea of the afterlife and the body are more intimately connected than we usually suppose. The relic functions as a cognitive bridge between bodily existence and whatever comes after. If anyone got to heaven we would assume it was the person who left a relic behind. It is a reminder that they once had physicality: that a body like mine can attain that other existence.

I started out thinking of the objects as primary and the believers as secondary. But I realized that the story of the objects was the story of human lives; not just the lives represented in the objects, but of those who congregate around them. And their human reasons for engaging in relic veneration are no more strange than needs I have.

(David Van Biema writes about religion for Time magazine.)