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New Pilgrimage Routes and Trails

by Daniel H. Olsen (Volume editor) Dane Munro (Volume editor) Ian S. McIntosh (Volume editor)
©2023 Edited Collection VIII, 312 Pages
Series: Pilgrimage Studies, Volume 2

Summary

Since the dawn of humanity, people have traveled in search of meaning and to petition for worldly and otherworldly blessings. In the twenty-first century, the number of people traveling to religious sacred sites on pilgrimage has increased more than at any point in human history. An increased demand for pilgrimage routes and trails with the spiritual rather than the religious walker in mind, has also led various enterprising groups and individuals to develop entirely new pilgrimage routes and trails. This book highlights this new chapter in pilgrimage and trail development with essays by pilgrimage scholars and practitioners working in over ten countries.
These include an examination of circular pilgrimage in The Netherlands, weird or «antipilgrimages» in the UK, and the revitalization of ancient trails along the Old Way to Canterbury, in the Baltic States, and on the Kumano Kodo in Japan. Entirely new trails include the Sufi Trail in Turkey, the Western Front Way in Europe, the Abraham Path in Southwest Asia, the Mormon Canadian Trail, and various new religious-themed trails in Lebanon. Human rights pilgrimages include one focused on peace building in Indigenous Australia, another on Indigenous settler pilgrimage protocols in Canada, and an emancipation pilgrimage along the Underground Railroad in the United States.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • List of Illustrations
  • 1 Developing New Religious Pilgrimage Routes and Trails - Daniel H. Olsen, Dane Munro, and Ian S. Mcintosh
  • 2 Saving Ourselves and Saving the Earth: New Circular Pilgrimage Routes in the Netherlands - Dane Munro
  • 3 Virtual and Hybrid Pilgrimage: Fictioning, Weird Realism, and Privileged Points - Phil Smith
  • 4 The Ghosts of Past and Future along England’s Old Way - Kathryn R. Barush
  • 5 Developing New Routes across North Europe: Walking in the Baltic States and England - John Eade and Tiina Sepp
  • 6 The Western Front Way: Connecting Points of War to Form a Path of Peace - Heather A. Warfield
  • 7 Religious, Economic and Political Considerations for Developing and Promoting New Pilgrimages Routes in Southern Lebanon - Nour Farra-Haddad
  • 8 The Abraham Path: A Pilgrimage in Time - Anisa Mehdi
  • 9 Turkey’s Sufi Trail: Revitalising a Medieval Pilgrimage - Iris Bezuijen and Sedat ÇAkır
  • 10 The Emergence of the Kumano Kodō as a Contemporary Pilgrimage Destination - Ricardo Nicolas Progano
  • 11 Walking for Justice and Reconciliation in Australia - Ian S. Mcintosh
  • 12 The Promise and Peril of Walking Indigenous Territorial Recognitions Carried Out by Canadian Settlers - Matthew Anderson And Ken Wilson
  • 13 Religious Theming as a Strategy for Tourism Development: The Case of Canada’s Mormon Trail - Daniel H. Olsen and W. Jack Stone
  • 14 The Pilgrim’s Pathway: Emancipation Pilgrimage on the Underground Railroad - Peggy Eppig
  • 15 Forging ahead on New Trails of Faith - Dallen J. Timothy
  • Notes on Contributors
  • Index
  • Series index

←viii | 1→

daniel h. olsen, dane munro, and ian s. mcintosh

1 Developing New Religious Pilgrimage Routes and Trails

Introduction

Religious pilgrimage has long been a driver of human mobility (Olsen and Timothy 2006; Holland 2018). Since the beginnings of humanity, people have travelled in search of meaning and to petition for worldly and otherworldly blessings. Some of the oldest human-made structures, such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, the Temple of Amada in Nubia (Egypt), Stonehenge in England, and the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum and the Ġgantija temples in Malta, were dedicated to enacting spiritual and religious rituals and sacrifices (Munro 2021). Over time, pilgrimage routes developed as people travelled to various human-built and natural axis mundis. Vast pilgrimage economies were developed to meet the physical and spiritual needs of the pilgrims, replete with accommodations and a growing number of religious sites vying for the attention of religious travellers through purported miracles, the promotion of religious relics and icons, and the creation of museums (Smiraglia 2013; Beltramo 2015). These pilgrimage networks today underlie much of the economic and transportation corridors upon which modern travel and business rely (Olsen 2019a).

While Asia and Europe have old, extensive, and well-developed pilgrimage networks that often stretch across multiple countries, pilgrimage pathways also exist in other world regions such as Africa and Latin and North America. In Africa, pilgrimage routes include pathways to Mecca, and the pilgrimage route to the Osun Osogbo sacred grove and shrine in Nigeria, and routes that commemorate the African slave trade in Cameroon (Hobbs 1917; King 1972; Birks 1977, 1978; Tanne 2003; Lecocq 2012; ←1 | 2→Enongene and Griffin 2018; Okonkwo and Eyisi 2020). There is also a long history of pilgrimage in Latin America (Crumrine and Morinis 1991; Palka 2014), with religious routes that include the Talpa de Allende Pilgrimage Trail in Mexico (Olsen and Sanchez 2018), the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, Peru (Maxwell 2012), and ancient pilgrimage trails to the ancient Incan capital of Cuzco (Sallnow 1987) and other sacred destinations throughout the Andres Mountains (Bauer and Stanish 2001). In North America, in addition to First Nations pilgrimage pathways and sites, many pilgrimage trails are related to nature, such as the Appalachian Trail (Rubin 2009; Redick 2019) as well as patriotic pilgrimages to national monuments, such as the government plaza in Washington, DC (Campo 1998; Greenia 2014; Mills 2021).

The number of people travelling to religious sacred sites has increased in the contemporary world, possibly more than at any point in human history. The World Tourism Organization (2011) and Timothy (2021) have estimated that an estimated 300–600 million people a year (pre-COVID-19) visit religious sites. This rise of visitors to religious sites has occurred in part because of both increasing efficiencies in the global transportation infrastructure and the rise of middle-class incomes, which together have led to a ‘democratization of travel’ (De Santis 1978). Now, people from different socio-economic situations who would normally not have the chance to visit far away religious destinations can do so. People living in religious diasporas are now more readily able to return to their homelands for pilgrimage purposes. Cheaper transportation has also led to an increase in international migrants, many of whom replicate and create new religious landscapes, spaces, and pilgrimage practices in their new homes (Olsen 2019a).

This increased movement of people towards religious sites has also been facilitated by the rise of the modern travel industry, in which government and tourism officials increasingly utilize religious landscapes, sites, and pathways to diversify tourism offerings for economic purposes (Olsen 2003). Indeed, while traditional religious pilgrimage still thrives in the modern world, particularly in Europe and Asia (UNWTO 2011), there has been a ‘blurring of boundaries’ (Kaelber 2002: 66) between pilgrimage and tourism due to their structural similarities. Modern secular ←2 | 3→tourist motivations are often conflated with religious motivations, with tourism being considered akin to a ‘sacred journey’ and tourists, like pilgrims, seeking authentic experiences with an ‘Other’ (MacCannell 1976; Graburn 1989). Indeed, the term ‘pilgrimage’ is frequently used to describe journeys that are ‘hyper-meaningful’ travel experiences or ‘undertaken by a person in quest of a place or a state that he or she believes to embody a valued ideal’ (Morinis 1992: 4). As such, skiing, visiting the gravesites of famous persons and battlefield memorials, skateboarding, and attending fandom conventions and sporting events are often referred to as pilgrimages (Gammon 2004; O’Connor 2018; Kavrecic 2018; Olsen 2022; Aslam, Oatley and Djikic 2021). More practically, much of what is considered religious pilgrimage has been fragmented and subsumed under the broader headings of ‘faith/pilgrimage tourism’, ‘religious tourism’, ‘spiritual tourism’, and ‘New Age tourism’ by tourism officials seeking to diversify tourism offerings to travellers (Olsen 2022).

In addition to ever-increasing numbers of people visiting religious sites, more people are also walking along traditional religious pathways, making traditional religious pilgrimage alive and well in the modern world. For example, the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, a network of pilgrimage routes throughout Europe that converge at the tomb of St James in Santiago de Compostela in Spain, has in recent decades seen a resurgence of people walking along these ancient routes. This growth in walkers along the Camino can be attributed to the designation of Santiago as a World Heritage Site in 1985 and the various routes of the Camino as a World Heritage Site in 1993 (Lois González 2013; Kim, Yilmaz and Ahn 2019). Also, many of the world’s largest mass gatherings are religious in nature, involving walking pilgrimages to sacred destinations. Examples include the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage in India (upwards to 120 million pilgrims), the Arba’een pilgrimage in Iraq (25 million pilgrims), the Hajj in Saudi Arabia (2.5 million), and the annual Easter meetings at Zion Christian Church in the Limpopo Province of South Africa (1 million). While many pilgrims drive or fly to these mass religious gatherings, most walk.

At the same time, the globalization of travel has led to not just increased contact between of different faith traditions, but also between different faith traditions and those who are ‘spiritual but not religious’ – ‘who are ←3 | 4→disillusioned with institutional religion yet feel that those same traditions contain deep wisdom about the human condition’ (Parsons 2018: 1). Many of those who now walk traditional pilgrimage trails fall under the ‘spiritual but not religious’ category. This move towards spirituality, as well as the ‘walking boom’ under the guise of wellness (Timothy and Olsen 2018), leads ‘spiritual tourists’ to utilize religious sites and pilgrimage routes and trails (Olsen 2022). However, newer pilgrimage routes and trails have been developed with the spiritual walker in mind (Reader 2007). In Sweden, Davidsson Bremborg (2013) notes that pilgrims walk in groups along religious pilgrimage routes and trails that have lost their original religious meaning. These routes and trails are now being utilized to interact with nature to facilitate spiritual experiences. This is the same with the Kumano Kodo in Japan, where many people walk along this trail to experience the serenity of the natural environment (Kato and Progano 2017). Others walk along pilgrimage routes and trails to heal from traumatic events in their lives through engaging with others pilgrims or walkers (Warfield, Baker and Foxx 2014). The Camino de Santiago is often filled with people who are not Catholic and walk to fulfil personal, physical, and psychological goals (Lois González 2013; Smith 2019; Warkentin 2018; Kim, Yilmaz and Ahn 2019). Smith (2019) notes the rise of ‘micro-pilgrimages’, where people create pilgrimage labyrinths to participate in pilgrimages in place. Barusch and Bertelsen Jr (2020) use the term ‘backyard pilgrimages’ to describe instances where people recreate transitional pathways in their backyards or in miniature. They give the example of Sara Postlethwaite, a sister of the Verbum Dei Missionary Fraternity, who recreated the 19-mile St Kevin’s Way pilgrimage route in Ireland on a series of daily 1.5-mile circuits in Daly City, California.

The growing demand for pilgrimage today can be seen in the (re)development of pilgrimage routes and trails, many based on the recent popularisation of the Camino de Santiago (‘caminoization’; see Bowman 2020; Gemzöe 2020). This can be seen in the work done by a group sponsored by the Bhutan Canada Foundation and the Tourism Council of Bhutan to restore the Trans Bhutan Trail – an ancient pilgrimage route across Bhutan (Couchman, Schroeder and Wangmo 2021; Couchman and Wangmo 2021). Mikaelsson and Selberg (2020) discuss the development of the new Fjord ←4 | 5→pilgrimage route in Norway, and Folkins (2019) describes the launch of the Camino Nova Scotia, developed by the Atlantic School of Theology in Canada to foster people’s spiritual growth. Other recent examples of new or revitalized pilgrimage religious routes and trails, and sites include:

St Magnus Way, Orkney, Scotland;1

Fife Pilgrim Way, Scotland;2

Walsingham Way;3

Christian climate pilgrimage in Cornwall, UK;4

The Irish Camino;5

The Camino de Malta;6

The Sinai Trail in Egypt;7

The Palestinian Heritage Trail;8

The Haemi Martyrdom Shrine in South Korea;9

Larantuka, Lembata Island, Indonesia;10

The Emmaus Trail, Israel;11

The St Olav Waterway Pilgrimage Trail in Norway;12

The Lycian Way in Turkey;13

The Great Hopewell Road pilgrimage in Ohio, USA;14 and

←5 | 6→

Mary apparition sites in Zeitoun, Cairo.15

This demand for pilgrimage routes and trails can also be seen in the ways in which people attempted to engage in pilgrimage-like travel in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With mandates by government and health officials around the world halting travel at all scales, long distance religious pilgrimage became virtually impossible, and religious sites that had hosted millions of people a year before struggled with ‘undertourism’ or ‘underpilgrimage’ (Olsen and Timothy 2021). While faith organizations worked on using digital technology to reach the faithful, attendance at religious sites and along pilgrimage pathways dwindled – although some individuals ignored these mandates and travelled to sacred sites anyways (Olsen and Timothy 2020; Olsen and Shinde in press). As Peteet (2020: 2203) noted, during times of uncertainty, like the COVID-19 pandemic, many people turn to religion for help with their ‘deeply rooted existential anxiety’ and spiritual health (Papazoglou et al. 2021). Being unable to visit religious sites or walk along religious routes, even at a hyper-local scale (e.g., visit a local church, mosque, or synagogue), people sought out other alternatives to improve their mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being.

While virtual pilgrimages via video satisfied some religiously minded believers (e.g. Séraphin and Jarraud 2022), others sought different ways to participate in more embodied pilgrimage journeys during the pandemic. For example, some enterprising entrepreneurs created or greatly expanded upon virtual reality apps that allowed people to virtually walk around popular religious sites (Cheng 2017; Miller 2020; Tercatin 2020). Many people chose to participate in the Camino de Santiago Virtual Challenge, where a person could download an app that would keep track of their distance-based exercise (e.g. bicycling, walking, running, and/or swimming) and then translate that distance into how far they would have walked along the Camino.16 In a similar vein, Miller (2020) noted an instance of one individual who developed a 5-km loop in her neighbourhood and logged her ←6 | 7→walking distance into a website that kept track of how far she had walked along the Camino Francis, one of the branches of the Camino de Santiago.17 A pilgrimage along a 30-mile stretch along Jacksonville Beach in Florida, sponsored by the Order of Malta, one of the oldest religious orders of the Catholic Church, saw a marked increase in participants during the pandemic (Clark 2020). In Northeastern Brazil, various parishes and religious site managers made adaptions to their pilgrimage traditions, such as in the state of Paraíba, where walking during the Penha Pilgrimage was replaced by a motorcade (De Oliveira et al. 2021).

At the same time, enterprising groups and individuals developed new pilgrimage routes and trails. For example, in Britain, the closure of religious sites led to a rise in ‘churchwalking’, where people would walk in small groups through the English countryside to small rural churches (Stanford 2021). Also, with the COVID-19 pandemic ruining what was to be the Year of Cathedrals and Pilgrimage in 2020, the British Pilgrimage Trust, in association with Association of English Cathedrals, created short COVID mandate-compliant circular routes meant to ‘bring the cities into sharp focus, emphasising a heightened sense of place and history, to encourage pilgrims to explore what makes the cathedral integral to the lives of the people there’ (Hayward n.d.: n.p.). One example of these routes was

a 3.5 mile circular route designed for Wakefield Cathedral [that] takes in the city’s Hepworth Museum – an award-winning contemporary art gallery named after Barbara Hepworth, one of the 20th century’s most important artists who was born and brought up in Wakefield – and the city’s Grade 1 listed Chantry Chapel, the oldest and most ornate of the five surviving bridge chapels in England. And Blackburn Cathedral’s circular route visits the Cotton Exchange and other places associated with its cotton trade heritage featured in the Netflix series The English Game. These places all play an important part in each city’s story – past and present (ibid.).

Another example of creating a pilgrimage tradition during the pandemic was how Matt Canlis, an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland in Wenatchee, Washington, USA, encouraged his congregants to create their own ‘Parish Path’, where congregants would choose a particular walking path and walk that path in small groups for fifteen minutes a ←7 | 8→day for forty days to create a sense of community during the pandemic (Woods 2020).

Defining Pilgrimage Routes and Trails

More broadly, routes and trails, religious or otherwise, are important linear pathways that link places together through facilitating trade, transporting goods, exploration, pilgrimage, and today, tourism. There are a wide range of definitions on what constitutes a trail or a route. However, following Timothy and Boyd (2015, pp. 3–4), trails can be defined as ‘visible linear pathway evident on the ground and which may have at its roots an original and historical linear transport or travel function’, while routes are ‘more abstract and often based on a modern-day conceptualization and designation of a circuit or course that links similar natural or cultural features together into a thematic linear corridor’, routes and trails can be travelled through various modes of transportation and exist at a variety of scales. They can also be defined based on whether they are organic or purposive in nature.

Many of the (re)developed pilgrimage routes and trails listed above and discussed in this book can be categorized as either organic or purposive in nature. According to Timothy and Boyd (2015), Boyd (2017), and Timothy and Olsen (2018) (see also Chapter 15, this volume), organic routes and trails evolve naturally over time and follow the ‘original tracks of a true historic trail of some sort’ (Timothy and Boyd 2015: 20). Many religious pilgrimage trails constitute some of the oldest types of ‘organic’ human-built trails, such as pilgrimage circuits in India, the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Europe, pilgrimage routes to Mecca, the Mount Kailash Hindu and Buddhist route in Tibet, the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trail in Japan, and the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem (Timothy and Boyd 2015). On the other hand, purposive routes and trails are ‘purposively designed and built for tourist consumption or to serve a specific tourism demand’ (Boyd 2017: 418). They are ‘typically delineated not by their historic association with a set route but rather by thematic content to link ←8 | 9→sites, establishments, and communities together that have similar pasts and similar products which appeal to comparable demand cohorts’ (Timothy and Boyd 2015: 24). These pathways, then, are formalized, transformed, and marketed as pilgrimage routes or trails and popularized over time. In this case, pilgrimage pathways are intentionally developed for economic purposes, to preserve an element of religious heritage, or to connect previously disparate religious sites together in a thematic way (Timothy and Olsen 2018; see also Chapter 15, this volume). Examples of purposive or ‘inorganic’ pilgrimage routes and trails include the St Patrick Trail in Ireland and the Jesus Trail and Gospel Trail in Israel (Boyd 2018).

The characteristics of these two types of pilgrimage routes or trails can be hybridized in cases where an organic pilgrimage route or trail is revitalized in an effort to promote it as both a religious and a cultural tourism route (Olsen and Timothy 2021). This can be seen, for instance, with the Camino de Santiago, which, as noted above, has also undergone a resurgence of pilgrims and walkers of other (or no) religious persuasion after it declined in popularity during the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries (see Luis González 2013). More specifically, government, religious, and tourism officials have worked on revitalizing the Ways of St James in Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, linking medieval churches and sanctuaries together to bring economic prosperity to the region (Duda 2018). In northern Germany, there are currently various initiatives to revitalize and rebrand the cultural pilgrimage route of St Otto of Bamberg, who was a missionary in the region (Duda 2018). The Ways to Jerusalem project attempts to restore pilgrimage routes that led from Europe to Jerusalem. Two specific itineraries are presently in development: A pilgrimage pathway through the eastern coast cities of the Mediterranean Sea and another pathway along the eastern shores of the Black Sea (Trono and Imperiale 2018).

The Value of Pilgrimage Routes and Trails

Like other types of economic and cultural routes and trails, pilgrimage trails bring both positive and negative economic, socio-cultural, and ←9 | 10→environmental benefits to locations and regions. From a negative perspective, over-development of pilgrimage routes and trails can lead to the commodification of religious and local culture, which, at an excessive level (e.g. aggressive selling of souvenirs or marking up prices for travellers), can compromise the walking experience (Shinde 2012). Over saturation of a pilgrimage route or trail due to special events or holidays may deter people who might otherwise visit a region from doing so (Saayman, Saayman and Gyekye 2014). Pilgrimage can also lead to contested interpretations between and within religious groups (Eade and Sallnow 2000; Olsen and Timothy 2002; Digance 2003; Olsen 2019b). Shinde (2018) gives the example of the types of environmental devastation that 500,000 pilgrims engaged in the Wari pilgrimage – in which people travel along a 210 km road from Alandi to Pandharpur in India – leave in the communities along the pilgrimage trail (see also Shinde and Olsen 2020 for other environmental impacts).

In many cases, however, the positive impacts of religious pilgrimage routes and trails, particularly the positive economic impacts (Ellyatt 2012), often outweigh the negative impacts. From an economic perspective, while pilgrimage has traditionally been an economic windfall in many world regions, particularly in rural areas, the rise of the tourism industry and its utilization of religious cultures and landscapes to diversify tourism offerings has led to the creation of new purposive pilgrimage routes and trails. As noted above, some of these routes or trails are based on existing religious infrastructure, while other routes and trails are created using a religious theme. For example, the revitalization of the Camino de Santiago occurred in part to help boost rural economies throughout Europe (Chemin 2016; González 2018). Also, while routes and trails may not seem to generate direct economic impacts because route and trail users are dispersed in a linear fashion, in aggregate, routes and trails can generate millions globally at locations along them from direct and indirect expenditures (Timothy and Boyd 2015: 153). Not only do routes and paths, particularly in rural areas, require little capital investment, but route and trail user expenditures lead to local and regional job creation, contributing to local livelihoods through indirectly benefiting from pilgrimage-related taxes and infrastructural development through public investiture (Balestrieri and Congiu 2017; Trono ←10 | 11→and Castronuovo 2018). The linear nature of pilgrimage routes and trails also link various destinations together. This linking, along with pilgrimage being a form of ‘slow travel’ (Howard 2012; Anthony 2018) – at least in the Western world (see Olsen and Wilkinson 2016) – both extends visitor stays in a region and spreads the economic benefits of pilgrim and religious tourist spending along these routes and trails. These positive economic impacts can lead people in communities along pilgrimage routes and trails that host visitors to have a positive view pilgrimage and cultural-heritage tourism development (Progano 2018). Pilgrimage route and trail development can also benefit religious organizations who rely on donations or entry fees to subsist.

Socio-culturally, pilgrimage route and trail development can enhance residents’ quality of life through providing recreational and aesthetically pleasing spaces for them to enjoy. The linking of different destinations can lead to greater local and regional identity through the promotion of historical, religious, spiritual, artistic, and traditional values (Boz 2018; Trono and Olsen 2018). Pilgrimage routes and trails also allow pilgrims walkers to express themselves spiritualty, religiously, and educationally, and can improve pilgrim and resident physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health (Warfield, Baker and Foxx 2014). Participation in walking pilgrimages can also break down socio-cultural barriers and be a pathway towards more peaceful relations between disparate cultural groups (McIntosh, Farra-Haddad and Munro 2019).

From an environmental perspective, because routes and trails are linear in nature, the negative environmental impacts of large numbers of tourists can be spread across various smaller nodes along the route or trail, thereby spreading the negative environmental impacts in a linear fashion rather than in a concentrated manner (Wall 1997). Routes and trails can also allow people to access the natural environmental in an environmentally responsible way, become more environmentally conscious, and, hopefully, stewards of the natural environment (Timothy and Boyd 2015). Routes and trails also limit the environmental impacts of walkers to a specific hardened pathway or reorienting them away from environmentally sensitive areas, thereby protecting the surrounding natural environment from further anthropogenic pressures and degradation (Tomczyk and Ewertowski ←11 | 12→2013; Godtman Kling, Fredman and Wall-Reinius 2017; Provalova 2019). As well, walking or biking along routes and trails is a low carbon-creation type of travel, which makes pilgrimage a low-impact form of travel (Weston and Mota 2012).

Book Structure and Content

With the winding down of the COVID-19 pandemic, many commentators have celebrated the re-opening of pilgrimage travel and the increasing traffic to sacred destinations (e.g. ABC Australia 2021; Mahoney 2021; Molina 2021; RFI 2022). As Singh (1998) and Olsen and Timothy (2020) note, pilgrimage travel tends to be ‘recession-proof’ and tends to be the first tourism niche market to rebound from economic and political turmoil – as it is presently (CBS News 2021). In addition, because of the existential angst that many people have felt during the pandemic and the move towards wellness travel as a healing methodology (Choe and Di Giovine 2021), religious pilgrimages – or at least walking a pilgrimage trail – may facilitate a pilgrimage ‘pandemic rebirth’ (Bywater 2022). As Bayer (2020), Walker (2021), and Choe (2022) argue, pilgrimage will probably be the next post-pandemic trend, being the surrogate for people to reconnect with themselves, others, and the natural world. In this vein, Mills (2021) suggests that while the United States has never had much of a pilgrimage tradition, new pilgrimage routes and trails should be developed to help with people seeking psychological and spiritual help and healing. In addition to religious pilgrimage routes and trails, purposive pilgrimage trails themed after aspects of popular culture are also being developed. For example, the El Camino del Anillo (the Way of the Ring), a 122-km trail through the mountain ranges of Andalusia, Spain, was created by the Laudato Si Foundation, a nature conservation charity with connections to the Archbishop of Madrid. This ‘Tolkien pilgrimage’ is inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings franchise and is marketing this route as an alternative to the other pilgrimage paths in Spain (Keith 2020; Machado 2020).

←12 |
 13→

The chapters in this volume highlights several of the themes noted in this chapter and many more. In Chapter 2, Dane Munro investigates the idea of circular pilgrimage routes by examining the Happier Ways and the Walk of Wisdom pilgrimage routes in the Netherlands, suggesting that while the ideas of linear and circular routes are very similar, circular routes seem to have a slightly different meaning within a Western context. In Chapter 3, Phil Smith describes the process of developing virtual pilgrimages and guidebooks through the practice of ‘weird pilgrimages’ or ‘anti-pilgrimages’ within two of his previous research projects: ‘Bonelines’ and ‘Endgame’. In Chapter 4, Kathryn Barush focuses on the Old Way pilgrimage from Southampton to Canterbury in the UK that gives a new expression of an ancient pilgrimage route. Barusch takes an ethnographic approach to discussing ritual praxis and communitas.

Chapter 5 by John Eade and Tiina Sepp examines the revitalization of pilgrimage trails in the Baltic States and England. While pilgrimage in these regions declined with the rise of Protestantism, today, many religious pilgrimage trails have been (re)developed, albeit with a focus on spiritual walkers rather than religious pilgrims. In Chapter 6, Heather Warfield takes readers to the front lines of World War I to discuss the development of a route along the Western Front Way which has long been connected to military pilgrimages. Chapter 7 focuses on the development of pilgrimage routes in Lebanon. Nour Farra-Haddad explains the importance of Lebanon as a ‘Land of Holiness’ and then focuses on two proposed pilgrimages, one which follows the footsteps of Jesus Christ and the other Saint Paul. In Chapter 8, Anisa Mehdi recounts the process of developing the Abraham Path, a trail in Southwest Asia that purportedly follows the travels of the prophet Abraham of the Old Testament. In Chapter 9, Iris Bezuijen and Sedat Çakır explore Turkey’s newly created Sufi Trail, a long distance pilgrimage that honors ancient Sufi traditions. In Chapter 10, Ricardo Nicolas Progano outlines the history and redevelopment of the Kumano Kodō in Japan. He outlines the historical importance of the pilgrimage route, its decline, and its modern importance as a spiritual walking trail.

Ian McIntosh takes readers to Australia in Chapter 11 to examine the use of pilgrimage trails for building bridges of trust and understanding between different ethnic, racial, and cultural groups. He asks whether there is potential in long-distance religious and secular walks inspired by the Camino de Santiago to deliver outcomes related to justice and reconciliation for Australia’s ←13 | 14→Indigenous peoples. In Chapter 12, Matthew Anderson and Ken Wilson examine Indigenous-settler protocols as they pertain to pilgrimage across First Nations lands as a form of ‘territorial acknowledgement’. In Chapter 13, Daniel Olsen and Jack Stone examine the creation of Canada’s Mormon Trail, a purposive route that links four smaller towns in Southwest Alberta using religious landscapes and culture. Peggy Eppig examines the growing popularity of ‘emancipation pilgrimage’ in Chapter 14, in which people walk along trails related to the Underground Railroad in the United States. Eppig focuses specifically on ‘The Pilgrim’s Pathway’ in Maryland and Pennsylvania for walkers who seek to both create spiritual-emotional bonds with these historic landscapes and confront past and present social justice issues. Dallen Timothy concludes this volume with both a reconsideration of the issues regarding religious pilgrimage routes and trails presented here and discusses other themes that should be considered in future research regarding new religious pilgrimage routes and trails.

Details

Pages
VIII, 312
Year
2023
ISBN (PDF)
9781800790803
ISBN (ePUB)
9781800790810
ISBN (MOBI)
9781800790827
ISBN (Softcover)
9781800790797
DOI
10.3726/b17963
Language
English
Publication date
2023 (June)
Keywords
Pilgrimage trails religious tourism sustainability Pilgrimage and trail development Human rights pilgrimages Pilgrimage protocols
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, 2023. VIII, 312 pp., 7 fig. b/w.

Biographical notes

Daniel H. Olsen (Volume editor) Dane Munro (Volume editor) Ian S. McIntosh (Volume editor)

Daniel H. Olsen is a Professor in the Department of Geography at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA. His research interests revolve around pilgrimage, tourism, and spirituality. He has published over 70 articles and book chapters, and is co-editor of Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys (2006), Religious Pilgrimage Routes and Trails: Sustainable Development and Management (2018), Dark Tourism and Pilgrimage (2020), Religious Tourism and the Environment (2020), and The Routledge Handbook of Religious and Spiritual Tourism (2022). Dane Munro is a Resident Academic at the Institute for Tourism, Travel and Culture (ITTC) at the University of Malta. His academic educational trajectory is marked by an MA in the Classics and a PhD in the cultural anthropology of pilgrimage and faith-based tourism at the University of Malta. He has also obtained a Ph.D. in history at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, regarding the culture of memoria and the identity of the knights of the Order of St John throughout the ages. Australian anthropologist and pilgrimage scholar Ian S. McIntosh is the Director of International Partnerships at IUPUI. He is the founder of the Sacred Journeys project that brings pilgrimage scholars together from across the world for an annual conference. He has authored and co-edited four books on pilgrimage and peace-building including Pilgrimage: Walking to Peace, Walking for Change, The Many Voices of Pilgrimage and Reconciliation, Pilgrimage in Practice, and Peace Journeys. He has also authored three books on Aboriginal Australian religion. Dr. McIntosh is also the co-founder of the Australia-based heritage group, Past Masters International, which works closely with Indigenous Australians in the mapping and protection of heritage areas and sacred sites.

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322 pages