Walking Where Jesus Walked
Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage
Hillary Kaell
Copyright Date: 2014
Published by: NYU Press
Pages: 288
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qg42j
Search for reviews of this book
Book Info
Walking Where Jesus Walked
Book Description:

Since the 1950s, millions of American Christians have traveled to the Holy Land to visit places in Israel and the Palestinian territories associated with Jesuss 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 Walkedoffers a lived religion approach that explores the trips hybrid nature for pilgrims themselves: both ordinarytied to their everyday role as the familys ritual specialists, and extraordinarysince 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 after 1948. 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.

eISBN: 978-0-8147-3825-2
Subjects: Religion
You do not have access to this book on JSTOR. Try logging in through your institution for access.
Log in to your personal account or through your institution.
Table of Contents
Export Selected Citations Export to NoodleTools Export to RefWorks Export to EasyBib Export a RIS file (For EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager, Zotero, Mendeley...) Export a Text file (For BibTex)
Select / Unselect all
  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. List of Figures
    List of Figures (pp. ix-x)
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND METHODOLOGY
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND METHODOLOGY (pp. xi-xiv)
  5. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. 1-28)

    Dale and I are waiting for the quiche to cool. It’s her culinary specialty, brags her husband Glen laughingly. In front of me is a display on a shelf near the stove: small olive wood carvings, a miniature jug of water, a set of glass salt and pepper shakers filled with more water and sand—Holy Land souvenirs from Dale’s recent trip. She turns on the CD of Christian hymns and Israeli-style melodies that she bought after their guide played it on the bus. Music fills the small bungalow and the two dogs start barking. Though normally subdued, Dale speaks...

  6. 1 Knowing the Holy Land: Sunday School Lessons and the Six O’Clock News
    1 Knowing the Holy Land: Sunday School Lessons and the Six O’Clock News (pp. 29-50)

    Helen has worshipped at the same Baptist church for fifty years. It is a small red-brick building with a classic white steeple in the countryside east of Raleigh, North Carolina. The main artistic adornment is a wall-length baptistery painting at the front of the sanctuary depicting the Jordan as a wide river with fast-moving rapids in the foreground and majestic mountains in the distance. The bright blue water is flanked by an idyllic green prairie graced with palm trees, a touch of Holy Land exotica.¹ The Jordan, as Helen finally saw it in 2009, looks nothing like the image she...

  7. 2 Soul Searching: Why Grandparents Go Abroad
    2 Soul Searching: Why Grandparents Go Abroad (pp. 51-75)

    For two years Helen watched Wally, her husband of nearly fifty years, die. Day after day she took him to the cancer and radiology center, where he underwent treatment that only seemed to worsen his condition. She remembers,

    He didn’t think God was ready for him to go. He was fighting so hard. And those years, when I think about it now, seem like it lasted forever and ever…. You’re just seeing him waste away and there’s nothing you can do. You want God to do a miracle but if there can’t be a miracle then you want God to...

  8. 3 Feeling the Gospel: Evangelicals, Place, and Presence
    3 Feeling the Gospel: Evangelicals, Place, and Presence (pp. 76-98)

    In 1928, as Protestant journalist William T. Ellis walked through the streets of Jerusalem, he was suddenly overcome by the “veritable presence” of Jesus as “the actual scenes of the life of Christ” “flooded” his mind. This “mood of place-consciousness,” he writes, is inevitable for any pilgrim who “in spirit as in body, treads these scenes sanctified by the feet of the Blessed.” Being in these particular places makes Jesus real and overwhelmingly present.¹

    In this description, Ellis’s travelogue drew on tropes already familiar to his 1920s readership. What is remarkable about this passage, then, is not its originality but...

  9. 4 The Middle Generation: Catholics, Scripture, and Tradition
    4 The Middle Generation: Catholics, Scripture, and Tradition (pp. 99-121)

    Janine has sparkling blue eyes and wears her gray hair in pigtails. She looked young for sixty-three as she sat across from me in Bethlehem, sharing a falafel sandwich with her husband, Frank. It was the first day of our trip and we made small talk about the food, the weather, the guide. Then, to my surprise, Janine steered the conversation toward topics more profound. “We’re the middle generation,” she told me, leaning across the table, “and we’re becoming a Bible people.” Middleness, for Janine, holds two overlapping meanings. She refers to how she and other baby-boom Catholics are “middle...

  10. 5 God and Mammon, God and Caesar: Commerce and Politics in the Holy Land
    5 God and Mammon, God and Caesar: Commerce and Politics in the Holy Land (pp. 122-159)

    “Catholics don’t believe this,” Father Mike reminded us as we descended the steep stairs into the Orthodox Church of the Sepulchre of Saint Mary at the Mount of Olives.¹ It was cool inside and filled with incense. In the darkness, hundreds of lamps and candles burned, reflecting light onto the gold and silver icons of Mary. Although our group did not necessarily believe the Orthodox claims about the site or the miraculous icon housed there, we were still clearly in a place of religious meaning, with priests and worshippers, chanting and candles. As we exited into the sunlight outside, we...

  11. 6 The Long Voyage Home: Transformation and Rituals of Return
    6 The Long Voyage Home: Transformation and Rituals of Return (pp. 160-196)

    Connie describes her pilgrimage two years ago as a fluke. There just happened to be a spot open, so she signed up. As she elaborates, however, she begins to contextualize it as the culmination of a series of events. Connie grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in Queens, New York, and moved to Boston when she married. Now sixty-two years old, she works full time as a nurse and cares for her grandchildren. She is chatty, energetic, and up on the latest fashion trends, even sporting a little rose tattoo on her ankle. Though she remains cheerful, Connie...

  12. Conclusion
    Conclusion (pp. 197-208)

    On the first day of Pastor Jim’s trip, the pilgrims emerged bleary-eyed from the Tel Aviv airport, having just arrived on an overnight flight from New York City. But Gilad’s enthusiasm was infectious. He grabbed the microphone as we settled into our seats on the bus. “Israel,” he began, “has something every other country has, yet none has: the Bible. Outside Israel, you have to open a book to read the Bible. In Israel, if you want to read it, you look out a window. You have reached the land of promises.” His greeting was poetic, and although I recognized...

  13. NOTES
    NOTES (pp. 209-240)
  14. BIBLIOGRAPHY
    BIBLIOGRAPHY (pp. 241-260)
  15. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 261-268)
  16. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR (pp. 269-269)