Travel books for spiritual pilgrims

This new edition of Kevin J. Wright’s popular Europe’s Monastery and Convent Guesthouses: a Pilgrim’s Travel Guide contains information about religious houses where travelers can stay in 17 countries, including France, England, Ireland, Austria and Italy. Monasteries are organized by country, and each short entry gives information on how to get there, including the nearest train station; what religious services one can attend when there; how many rooms are available; whether it accepts only men or only women; and how to contact the house and make a reservation. Some monasteries, especially well-known places like Iona Abbey, Scotland, are easier to contact from the United States and have Web sites, e-mail and fax numbers. Other, smaller houses have only phone numbers and street addresses.

“More than 300 million people today embark on faith-based trips,” Wright, who is the founder and president of the World Religious Travel Association, explains in an introduction. “In North America alone, one in four Americans is interested in taking a ‘spiritual vacation.’ With this in mind, monasteries and convents continue to open their doors across Europe and the world to travelers and pilgrims, just as they have done for centuries.”

Aware that not all these spiritual pilgrims are Catholic, Wright gives readers orientation to the history of Christian monasticism and some background on important monastic figures such as Antony of Egypt, Benedict and Francis of Assisi, along with an “everything you wanted to know about …” section that defines basic terms such as “Sister” and “Liturgy of the Hours.”

Tamara Park, a young Protestant Christian and recent theology graduate student, is a world traveler who spent a year of her master of divinity studies in Jerusalem and in her mid-20s volunteered with a nonprofit organization in Belgium. She is now “pastor of community” at Warehouse 242, a church in Charlotte, N.C., her home state. While in Jerusalem, Park began to wonder if people of different faiths, in East and West, could ever get along.

She opens Sacred Encounters: From Rome to Jerusalem, “When the world feels all jittery, like it just quit smoking, and the questions of my soul start to sound like a heavy metal concert gone awry, I find I must travel. It tends to still me.”

With this in mind, Park decided to go on a 40-day pilgrimage with two friends, traveling from Rome to Jerusalem on a shoestring budget, staying wherever they could in $10-a-night hostels and in people’s homes. Their pace was breakneck -- they visited about two countries a week, 13 countries in all, including Croatia, Bosnia, Greece and Lebanon. All along the way, she asked those she encountered to describe God. She recorded these conversations on her iPod, and they became the substance of the book.

At times, their insights are quite meaningful. Park had an interesting conversation with a priest in Florence, Italy, who said that he keeps the faith even while most of Florence is not religious at all. And it’s a highlight of the book to read about Park’s experience in Antioch, Turkey, where Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christians pray together and try as best they can to live as one church, modeling themselves on the early Christian communities that had their start in this ancient city.

But the book, at 334 pages, is also overly long and packed with way too much detail. Park could have done without describing the food on the table at seemingly every meal, or the bowel trouble that plagued her throughout the trip to Syria. She also launches into the pilgrimage almost immediately, with almost no introduction to herself -- her age, her background, her upbringing -- which leaves the reader a bit frustrated. We do learn more about her on the way, though, and Sacred Encounters does a good job of evoking how travel can broaden your horizons, especially when you are young and free to wander.

-- Erin Ryan,
NCR staff

Progressive Nation: A Travel Guide with 400+ Inspiring Landmarks and Left Turns could be appealing to a reader wanting snapshots of various progressive movements and moments in U.S. history. But unfortunately, its usefulness for travelers is limited -- bogged down by an excess of destinations at which there is little or nothing to see or do.

The introduction includes a “key for readers,” with pictographs that signal whether the site is a museum or a monument -- good information, to be sure -- and then no less than four pictographs for sites at which you’ll likely have nothing more to do than, in the author’s words, “soak up the lingering progressive aura.”

This is not in itself a bad thing, used sparingly among more substantial sites and activities, but instead these latter four categories make up a significant portion of Progressive Nation. Author Jerome Pohlen sometimes stretches the point to breaking: Do I really need to go to the Washington Hilton just because comedian Stephen Colbert ruthlessly mocked President Bush there in 2006?

One wonders what was left out to make room for these kinds of items. In the case of my own hometown, for example, the guidebook does not include Kansas City’s Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which may not fall within a more narrowly political definition of “progressive,” but does offer a cultural window into the history of race relations in the United States. A tourist would learn more at that museum, and surely have a better time, than he or she would driving past the address of a no-longer-extant house that was involved in a Supreme Court case on illegal search and seizure -- Kansas City’s only entry in Progressive Nation. And pity poor Nevada and Hawaii: Each state gets a mention for movements (anti-nuclear and pro-gay marriage, respectively) but not one destination for the traveler between them.

The author notes in his introduction that he could not represent every progressive movement in U.S. history, but more focused and practical choices could have made Progressive Nation a better resource as the travel guide it wants to be.

-- Teresa Malcolm,
NCR staff

National Catholic Reporter January 23, 2009