"His Mission on Earth" is a reissue of "Kenny: The Man Who Looked Like the Shroud," published some thirty years ago. Though even more relevant today, what inspired me to present this book anew was witnessing the effect of the original version on a woman painting our Massachusetts house. Estranged from her husband, this recent college graduate was struggling to pay her bills, retain custody of two children, and keep her old van running. Seeing an open box of some of the books in our garage, the harried young woman asked to borrow a copy. This was on a Friday; when she returned to work on Monday, the person I saw appeared to have been elevated to some higher, joyous plane and was now tripping the light fantastic with angels, as she gushed, "You don't know how lucky you are to have known Kenny."

This is a first-hand account about the inspired mission of Kenny Klinkert, a startling Jesus look-alike, who believes he has a personal kinship with the image of the man imprinted on the Shroud of Turin -- which may or may not have covered the body of the crucified Christ.

The first time I saw Kenny he was skipping along a sidewalk in Laguna Beach in his frayed running shorts, a brown paper bag in hand and pumping his arm in the air while proclaiming to the world his message of life over death. Our eyes locked momentarily -- a strange unfocused gaze as if trying to penetrate some distant obscuring mist of time and place, perhaps beyond this life and this earth, to a dimension in which he and I might have known each other before.

I eventually took it on myself to follow Kenny with a microcassette tape recorder, keeping a step behind as he skipped along the boardwalk and streets of this upscale town, shouting at passing beachgoers and pedestrians, "Wake up! Wake up! Time is short. When you die, you won't even see the dark." With his demeanor reminiscent of a disoriented Biblical prophet, Kenny was the message no less than his words.

People who have read the original book have often asked," Well, what do you think? Is he just a mentally troubled Vietnam ex-G.I. or could he be some sort of an embodied herald or an emissary from another dimension? As a matter of fact, I myself have continued to wonder: who is this Kenny anyway? I can never forget the time I watched him skip away into the night after one of our recorded interviews at my one-room oceanside abode, and saw huge sparks racing along the high-tension wires between the utility poles he had just passed. Another challenging mystery concerns the photos I had attempted to take, one of which made him look as if enclosed within a shroud, and another one was likewise inexplicably distorted. [Both photos are among those featured in the book]. Curiously, Kenny's mother, shortly before her death, revealed to her son that she had a similarly distorting experience when she looked into a mirror a few days before giving him birth.

Here's another assessment from an observer in Kenny's hometown of Savannah, Georgia, Carl Fleischaker:
"The first time I saw Kenny was from a car. Normally, I would have seen just another long-haired hippie-type walking down the street, carrying a bicycle wheel. He had a kind of a scowl on his face -- not too unusual a sight. But as I was driving by, it flashed on my mind that this was no hippie but a modern-day prophet, a seasoned avatar carrying the wheel of life and determined to bestow wisdom on the world. I am a relatively straight sort of a guy, and I don't usually see prophets and avatars. I have a degree in psychology, I sell real estate, I keep my lawn cut and the pool clean, and I voted for Ronald Reagan twice. But all the same, I felt compelled to pull over and check this guy out."

May I invite you to check this guy out yourself?