When you think about it, looking a skull square in the empty eye sockets can seem pretty creepy. Macabre, perhaps. Definitely dark. Father Ambrose Little realizes this.

But when the cranium of the medieval Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas comes to visit, the mood is actually quite joyous, and not just for Dominican friars like Little. For the hundreds of people who came to kneel before it at St. Dominic’s Church in Washington, D.C., last month, it was exciting, like a pilgrimage. But it was no funeral.