Description
Religious forms of pilgrimage that arose during the European Middle Ages are being revived along their original routes, but even for religious travelers those trails are now re-purposed to serve modern rationales, modern needs. Some undertake a true spiritual journey but without subscribing to any denomination at all, while others insist they are simply using the landscapes and mechanisms of pilgrimage for ordinary sorts of self-improvement, like eco-tourism or exercise. The Camino de Santiago in Spain has grown to some quarter-of-a-million walkers and bikers a year and its social structures are being actively copied by interfaith groups in Virginia and Kentucky, revivers of the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad, and those commemorating both the native American Trail of Tears and the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico. What are the underlying patterns that allow pilgrimage, patriotism and sacred memory to converge?
