Christian Pilgrimage: Persons, Places, Texts

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

For many Christians, sacred places have been central to their religious experience: they have visited, prayed towards, imagined, and even reproduced them in miniature. Beginning with the Bible, this course will examine the development of holy places. We will attend to historical questions (How and when did shrines develop? What did they look like? Who were the people who went on pilgrimage? What was it like to travel?), as well as to literary ones (Why did pilgrims write about their experience? What is the nature of this genre? What might have been the impact of these writings on audiences “back home”?). But our overarching questions will be theological: What does it mean to localize the holy, to believe that God is more present in some places than in others? In pursuing answers to these questions, we will look not only at texts, but also at objects—ordinary things as well fine art—and at film (commercial and documentary). In the first half of the semester, we will focus largely on the early church, looking first at the phenomenon of pilgrimage to holy people, and then at the development of the “Holy Land.” In the second half of the course, we will turn to the great pilgrimage shrines in western Europe, especially Santiago de Compostela (and its associated Camino) and Lourdes.