Traveling Souls: Contemporary Pilgrimage Stories

from the Foreword by Pico Iver
"Reading the wonderfully varied and unexpected stories assembled here, I was struck by how much the notion of pilgrimage today has to do with retrieving a sense of purpose (and simplicity, and constancy); with putting oneself, quite literally, in the footsteps of the past. Once upon a less secular time, almost everyone made pilgrimages, and most of the great works of our early literature--Dante's ascent into the stars, Chaucer's wanderers to Canterbury, the tales of Orpheus and Odysseus and Hercules--commemorate both inward and outward journeys; these days, I suspect, many of us travel in part to experience pilgrimage by proxy. Most of the travelers in this volume leave home, as I have done, to partake of someone else's pilgrimage, and so to learn what animates people to undertake such sacrificial tasks; the destination of pilgrimage is pilgrimage itself."

Table of Contents

Pico Iyer Foreword
Brian Bouldrey Preface

Abigail Seymour, "Ultreya"
Malcolm X, "Mecca"
Alice Walker, "Looking for Zora"
Alane Salierno Mason, "Holy City"
Marvin Barrett, "Climbing to Christmas"
Rachel Kadish, "Reparation Spoken Here?"
Gretel Ehrlich, "The Road to Emei Shan"
John Hanson Mitchell, "Providence Hill"
Barbara Wilson , "Joshua Tree"
Michael Wolfe, "When Men and Mountains Meet"
Satish Kumar, "Iona"
Anne Cushman, "Spiritual Discomfort"
Oliver Statler, "Japanese Pilgrimage"
Jennifer Lash, "Lourdes"
Gary Paul Nabhan, "La Verna's Wounds"