1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910480162003321

Autore

Kaell Hillary

Titolo

Walking Where Jesus Walked : American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage / / Hillary Kaell

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : New York University Press, , [2014]

©2014

ISBN

0-8147-3825-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (284 p.)

Collana

North American Religions ; ; 3

Disciplina

263.0425694

Soggetti

Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages - Palestine

Christianity - United States

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Figures -- Acknowledgments and Methodology -- Introduction -- 1. Knowing the Holy Land -- 2. Soul Searching -- 3. Feeling the Gospel -- 4. The Middle Generation -- 5. God and Mammon, God and Caesar -- 6. The Long Voyage Home -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author

Sommario/riassunto

Since the 1950's, millions of American Christians have traveled to the Holy Land to visit places in Israel and the Palestinian territories associated with Jesus’s life and death. Why do these pilgrims choose to journey halfway around the world? How do they react to what they encounter, and how do they understand the trip upon return? This book places the answers to these questions into the context of broad historical trends, analyzing how the growth of mass-market evangelical and Catholic pilgrimage relates to changes in American Christian theology and culture over the last sixty years, including shifts in Jewish-Christian relations, the growth of small group spirituality, and the development of a Christian leisure industry. Drawing on five years of research with pilgrims before, during and after their trips, Walking Where Jesus Walked offers a lived religion approach that explores the trip’s hybrid nature for pilgrims themselves: both ordinary—tied to their everyday role as the family’s ritual specialists, and extraordinary—



since they leave home in a dramatic way, often for the first time. Their experiences illuminate key tensions in contemporary US Christianity between material evidence and transcendent divinity, commoditization and religious authority, domestic relationships and global experience. Hillary Kaell crafts the first in-depth study of the cultural and religious significance of American Holy Land pilgrimage after1948. The result sheds light on how Christian pilgrims, especially women, make sense of their experience in Israel-Palestine, offering an important complement to top-down approaches in studies of Christian Zionism and foreign policy.