Bones of Contention

Bones of Contention has a very narrow focus. It is similar to the voices called for patrimony to be returned - like the Benin bronzes to Nigeria, the mummies from different museums to Egypt, and the obelisks to Ethiopia. But it is much narrower than that - it is about relics, not all relics, but people's bones. If a church in Europe
wants to keep a burial shroud or a church in America wants to keep an apostles sandals, we don't object to that. Specifically, we protest the "fragmentation of relics". That is, when the bones on one apostle are buried in many places. This is anathema and we try to scope some of the best known examples. By the way, not all apostles got split up into body parts. Some of them are intact. So we give those our blessing and try to expose those apostles whose bones are fragmented into
different places. We hope that this can be a prelude to a campaign to gather all the body parts of each saint into one single reliquary. We do a quick scan of what the laws of most countries say about this practice and point out that what the church has done is not in sync with best practices for burial. This happened over twenty centuries, so there are a lot of stories to tell about how the veneration of relics emerged, and how it went over the top.