I'm an English professor/long-distance hiker who loves both the experience of walking in cool places and then writing about the adventure. I've hiked across several European countries and odd sections of the Appalachian Trail—such as New Jersey. As for the "quirky narrator" part, apparently I'm brave, brazen, or bizarre to explore the world unescorted. I find I meet more people when traveling alone and pursue my thoughts to a greater extent. I love it when a writer finds a way to put their vulnerabilities on the page in a way that doesn't alienate others (or themselves). I love books with strong, individualistic narrative voices that draw you into their stories.
Christmas's tale was one of the two narratives (out of dozens I read) that inspired me to make pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, the other being Emilio Estevez's film, The Way. What I admire about Christmas is that she is unafraid of criticisms that will inevitably be directed towards a female writer who tells it all, just like it is: Her distaste for the women who accompanied her on a pilgrimage. Her decision to move on alone. Her unstinting descriptions of dismay about the physical challenges of long-distance hiking. Her distrust of men who have intentions on her person! Yet Christmas's experience is not all negative. Like other "true pilgrims," Christmas steps out of her western, worried, ego-centered self and finds a refreshing new perspective.
To celebrate her 50th birthday and face the challenges of mid-life, Jane Christmas joins 14 women to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Despite a psychic's warning of catfights, death, and a sexy, fair-haired man, Christmas soldiers on. After a week of squabbles, the group splinters and the real adventure begins. In vivid, witty style, she recounts her battles with loneliness, hallucinations of being joined by Steve Martin, as well as picturesque villages and even the fair-haired man. What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim is one trip neither the author nor the reader will forget.
I am an American-trained Indonesian anthropologist, teacher, writer, researcher, and academic nomad who has lived and taught at a Saudi university. I have travelled since childhood. When I was a kid or teenager, I journeyed to various places and cities for schooling away from my home village (and parents) in the isolated highlands of Central Java. I also travelled for shepherding my goats which I did after school. So, I love to travel, learn many things from my travel, and as a teacher of Anthropology of Travel, I have always been fascinated by literature on travel whatever its forms ranging from pilgrimage and nomadism to migration and tourism.
Concerning the study of the hajj (i.e. Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca), I consider this book is pioneering primarily because it utilizes original sources and documentation left by Ottoman administrators to depict and recreate uneasy experiences of the pilgrims’ everyday life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of Arabia. During these centuries, Mecca was under the control and authority of the Ottoman sultans, and the hajj pilgrimage was an extremely tough journey: long, arduous, and fraught with danger. This work has contributed to our understandings of the pilgrims’ conditions and mundane activities and the sultans’ policies of the pilgrimage.
The pilgrimage to Mecca - the hajj - is a major aspect of the Islamic religion, yet little has been written about its history or of the conditions under which thousands of pilgrims from far flung regions of the Islamic world travelled to the heart of the Arabian peninsula. This pioneering book concentrates on the pilgrimage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Mecca was ruled by the Ottoman sultans. At a time when, for the majority of the faithful, the journey was long, arduous and fraught with danger, the provision of food, water, shelter and protection for pilgrims presented…
Brandon Wilson is an author, photographer, explorer, and pilgrim. He is a voracious explorer of nearly one hundred countries, he has trekked many pilgrimage trails, including: the Camino de Santiago, Camino Catalan, Camino Aragonés and Via de la Plata across Spain, and twice the St. Olav’s Way across Norway and Sweden. Brandon and his wife Cheryl were the first Western couple to complete the 1100-kilometer pilgrim trail from Lhasa, Tibet to Kathmandu, and he was the first American to traverse the 1850-kilometer Via Francigena from England to Rome. In 2006, he and his French friend re-blazed the 4500-kilometer route of the First Crusades from France to Jerusalem, naming it the Templar Trail, to establish it as a path of peace.
For many, travel reaches a point where it becomes something more than a moveable buffet and checks off a bucket-list. The Art of Pilgrimage helps you make this transition and realize you’re not alone. It traces the history of pilgrimage or mindful journeys with stories and anecdotes from past sojourners to a wide variety of locations for equally diverse reasons.
"One of the greatest travel books I have ever read." Peter Feibleman, author of Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman
#1 Bestseller in Atlases & Maps
The classic guide to making travel meaningful. The Art of Pilgrimage is a travel guide full of inspiration for the spiritual traveler.
Not just for pilgrims. We are descendants of nomads. And although we no longer partake in this nomadic life, the instinct to travel remains. Whether we're planning a trip or buying a secondhand copy of Siddhartha, we're always searching for a…
Ardizzone is one of those American
novelists who deserves more recognition.
In Bruno’s Shadow, set in Rome, is
writing of the highest order from a novelist who tackles big themes and big
personalities and fills each page with wisdom and insight of the highest
order.
Ardizzone artfully weaves together the stories of seven strangers whose fates--and faiths--become intertwined as they make a pilgrimage to the fountains, the churches, and the miracles of Rome.
A troubled young Croatian woman named Dubravka travels to the site of apparitions of the Virgin Mary and witnesses a miracle. Twenty years later, after working as a kitchen sister in a cloistered convent, she goes to Rome where she finds that for a few months prior to the pope's death her habit of prayer triggers miracles of sorts in others. The chapters describing their overlapping experiences in Rome alternate with the chapters presenting the story of Dubravka's life
The pilgrim’s journey to the ancient Catholic shrine at Santiago de Compostela had fascinated me ever since I first read about it.
For centuries, pilgrims had made this arduous journey, the majority of them on foot, along a trail in northern Spain that stretched for over five hundred miles. Many had written of the transformation they underwent as a result of making this journey.
Even though I am not a Catholic, I decided to undertake the journey myself in 2011 in the company of my son – and then decided to write about what I had experienced and learned as a result of my journey. Having written my book I became interested in learning what others who had done this journey had to say about the Camino. What was their experience, what perspective did they offer, were they also changed (as I was) by undertaking this “pilgrimage”?
Guy Thatcher's book contains useful information and evocative descriptions of places along the trail, people he met, the weather he encountered, and his everyday experience - together with pertinent observations and views. If you have done the pilgrimage, you will enjoy revisiting it through this book. If you are thinking about doing the pilgrimage, it will set the scene and encourage you to undertake it.
A Journey of Days: Relearning Life s Lessons on the Camino de Santiago, by Guy Thatcher, takes us for a 700-kilometre walk along the camino in northern Spain, an age-old pilgrimage route walked by young and old alike for centuries. He walked the camino hoping to discover the reason for the compulsion that drove him there.
This is an elegantly presented, intelligent book. Your goal may not be to walk the camino, as Thatcher has done, but you ll come away informed, inspired and touched by this beautiful narrative. The real story is the pilgrims met along the way. This…
In the natural course as a young man, I became a husband and a father. I have four children and eleven grandchildren. Fatherhood has been the most difficult yet rewarding job of my life. You never stop being a parent. So, it was inevitable that this would become a subject of my writing. I have tried to be a compassionate caregiver and a positive role model to my children; you’ll have to ask them if I’ve succeeded. In my novel, I try to depict two fathers (and their two sons) as good yet flawed men, doing their best and finding their way. Just as all fathers do.
I’ve read this short novel more than twenty times. It is the story of a young writer seeking a spiritual father in a famous author because his actual father is rejecting him for something he wrote. As a writer myself, I identified with the character’s deep need for paternal approval in the face of staying true to his art.
I return to Roth’s novel every couple of years because the story of a son seeking the blessings of a father, whether in his art or his life, continues to resonate with me, and with each reading I find something new in it. This novel is a minor classic and has a permanent place on my shelf.
When talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes his pilgrimage to sit at the feet of his hero, the reclusive master of American Literature, E. I. Lonoff, he soon finds himself enmeshed in the great Jewish writer's domestic life, with all its complexity, artifice and drive for artistic truth.
As Nathan sits in breathlessly awkward conversation with his idol, a glimpse of a dark-haired beauty through a closing doorway leaves him reeling. He soon learns that the entrancing vision is Amy Bellette, but her position in the Lonoff household - student? mistress? - remains tantalisingly unclear. Over a disturbed and confusing…
Pantheons and worship are elements of culture I’ve always found fascinating, partly from being a mostly secular person with relatives who are very religious. I read a lot of epic fantasy when I was younger that featured gods, like Erikson, and I love finding more recent works that play with how deities might affect a world, and vice versa. But I also picked some of the books below because they inject cli-fi or solarpunk into their worlds – something I’ve been adding to my second-world fantasy lately. Because why not create the same sort of aesthetic in other worlds?
I’ve only said this once about a book: this is the sort of indie work that traditional publishers should be salivating over but would never have the courage to publish. There is such a wealth of emotion and reality in Heretic’s Guide. It’s a quiet, deliberate but fraught story of a human who doesn’t realize how much he needs the help of the godly being he befriends, or that the godly being needs him just as much. Fair warning that it’s a hefty story that’s more cerebral than action-packed, but the mystery, compelling dialogue and wondrous worldbuilding makes this one of my favorite books of all time. (Also the sequel to this duology is even better. Just saying.)
TRIPLE GOLD MEDALIST IN THE 2019 INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER BOOK AWARDS!WINNER OF THE 2019 READERVIEWS AWARD FOR FANTASY!“Life is transformation. You change or you die.”Ashamed of his past and overwhelmed by his future, Ronoah Genoveffa Elizzi-denna Pilanovani feels too small for his own name. After a graceless exit from his homeland in the Acharrioni desert, his anxiety has sabotaged every attempt at redemption. Asides from a fiery devotion to his godling, the one piece of home he brought with him, he has nothing.That is, until he meets Reilin. Beguiling, bewildering Reilin, who whisks Ronoah up into a cross-continental pilgrimage to the…
I always wanted to know what went on during the
undocumented ages of our biblical forefathers’ lives. Who were the ‘other sons
and daughters’ they bore? With much-inspired fantasy, Natasha Woodcraft conjures
up a vivid story and develops the emotional conflicts that develop within the
growing primeval family.
In the context of this unfamiliar setting, the author illuminates
timeless spiritual struggles common to many of us, as we become aware of our
past failures and face an uncertain future. As such, this book is deeply
relevant to any serious-minded person seeking to restore broken relationships
and discover purpose in life.
One fateful day, she loses the two men she loves most. Can hope triumph after the first murder? Awan is reeling in agony. The man she loved has murdered her twin brother then disappeared. Tormented by his actions, recovery seems an impossible dream. When her well-meaning father tries to marry her to someone else, Awan refuses, knowing her heart is broken beyond repair. Questioning the God who claims to stand for justice, Awan struggles to forgive. How can she when the murderer is still out there? Then she makes a terrible mistake that threatens to fracture her family further. In…
I am a biologist and I am also interested in spiritual explorations and sacred places. These books discuss some of the most interesting issues in science, and the nature of ultimate consciousness - the primary subject of theology, consciousness. I am also very interested in spiritual practices that have measurable effects, as discussed in my books Science and Spiritual Practices and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work.
This is a truly wonderful guide, lavishly illustrated to hundreds of holy places in Britain, together with pilgrim routes on foot that connect them. This book includes ancient sacred sites, holy wells and springs, sources of rivers, cathedrals, medieval village churches and ancient trees. This is a book that literally opens new horizons and magical doorways, complete with practical details on how to get there.
Britain's
Pilgrim Places captures the
spirit of 2,000 years of history, heritage and wonder. It is the complete guide
to every spiritual treasure, including 500 enchanting holy places throughout
England, Wales and Scotland and covers all major pilgrimage routes.
Produced in collaboration with
The British Pilgrimage Trust, this book encapsulates the timeless quest of the human
spirit to find meaning, connection and peace.
Each listing is illustrated
in full colour and written and presented in a way that appeals to everyone.
From wild hermit islands to city-centre cathedrals alike, there is something to
surprise and enlighten anyone with a sense…
I’d already published a scholarly book about the household of a medieval widow, who was just a decade older than Margery Kempe and lived sixty miles away, so the time, place, and mindset seemed very familiar. As a Jungian Psychoanalyst I’m interested in how individuals find the central meaning in their lives. Clearly for Margery it was the search for God, although she doesn’t appear to have been a kindly soul. When I read that she twice quarreled with her maidservant, I realised the maidservant could tell her own tale. And so she did, and sometimes it seemed she was dictating it to me! Characters really do speak for themselves...
There’re numerous books on medieval pilgrimage, and even though I don’t agree with all of Sumption’s conclusions, I’m recommending this for its readability and fascinating anecdotes and quotations, drawn from contemporary accounts, which were invaluable for my research. It’s informative about both the devout and more worldly travelers, kings, queens, clerics and nobles, and the common people of the day.
One major drawback is that his focus is largely on France and Rome, while Jerusalem, Santiago, and the German pilgrimage sites don’t get the attention they deserve. But this just demonstrates how popular pilgrimage was throughout the Middle Ages and how busy the highways and byways were with crowds of pilgrims. I learnt that people were much more mobile at this time than I had thought.
We are apt to forget how much people traveled in the Middle Ages. Not only merchants, friars, soldiers and official messengers, but crowds of pilgrims were a familiar sight on the roads of Western Europe. In this engaging work of history, Jonathan Sumption brings alive the traditions of pilgrimage prevalent in Europe from the beginning of Christianity to the end of the fifteenth century. Vividly describing such major destinations as Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury, he examines both major figures--popes, kings, queens, scholars, villains--and the common people of their day.…
