REL 133, 134 - Pilgrimage: Rites of Way

1 course unit

Why is travel almost universally understood to hold the potential for significant transformation? How do various communities and individuals define sacred travel through their own practice, and how does it define them in turn? This course employs the many methodologies of Religion Studies in investigating pilgrimage around the world. We will look to a number of modern theoretical interpretations of sacred journey, and will examine ethnographic accounts of pilgrimage primarily in the contexts of Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Pilgrimage will serve as our window onto these traditions’ ethical systems, cosmologies of space and time, religious art and aesthetics, and views of the body’s agency and power, and in some cases, onto the contested space of multiple traditions’ holy ground.
Meets general academic requirement DE and HU (and W when offered as 134).