Since the 1950s, millions of American Christians have traveled to the Holy Land to visit places in Israel and the Palestinian territories associated with JesusOCOs 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, a Walking Where Jesus Walked aoffers a lived religion approach that explores the tripOCOs hybrid nature for pilgrims themselves: both ordinaryOCotied to their everyday role as the familyOCOs ritual specialists, and extraordinaryOCosince 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."

Book Excerpt: ice. It appeared he owed the gentleman 1300 florins, and had wished to abscond, but was luckily overtaken before the departure of the boat. This affair was hardly concluded when the bell rang, the wheels began to revolve, and too soon, alas, my dear ones were out of sight!I had but few fellow-passengers. The weather was indeed fine and mild; but the season was not far enough advanced to lure travellers into the wide world, excepting men of business, and those who had cosmopolitan ideas, like myself. Most of those on board were going only to Presburg, or at farthest to Pesth. The captain having mentioned that a woman was on board who intended travelling to Constantinople, I was immediately surrounded by curious gazers. A gentleman who was bound to the same port stepped forward, and offered his services in case I should ever stand in need of them; he afterwards frequently took me under his protection.The fine mild weather changed to cold and wind as we got fairly out into the great Danube. I wraRead More

In his final book--a lasting testament to his love for the Holy Land and the Jewish and Palestinian people--the beloved Cistercian monk, who passed away in 2005, meditates on his travels to Nazareth, Mt. Sinai, and other sites in the Holy Land. Six photos. Map. (Catholic)

Finding Jesus in Israel a book for travel veterans, people with wanderlust, or readers who just love a good story. We are all shaped and transformed by the oceans we sail, the deserts, mountains, and valleys we wander, and the people we meet along the way. And as any traveler worth his salt knows, the real trip happens within. Sunday school stories are no longer just stories -- Israel is a tangible place populated with living souls. Author and travel veteran, Buck Storm takes an unvarnished look at the Holy Land with an off-the-bus peek into the people and places that make Israel such an amazing destination. Part travel journal but mostly spiritual guide, Finding Jesus in Israel takes you across the world, to lands where Abraham settled, through the very streets Jesus walked, and to the shore of waters that Paul sailed. Are you ready?

From “a marvelous new voice” (Rebecca Makkai), these “extraordinarily imaginative” (Sigrid Nunez), “revelatory” (Nicole Krauss), “superb” (Kiran Desai) stories transcend borders as they render the intimate lives of people striving for connection. WINNER OF THE AJL JEWISH FICTION AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE WINGATE PRIZE The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land announces the arrival of a natural-born storyteller of immense talent. Warm, poignant, delightfully whimsical, Omer Friedlander’s gorgeously immersive and imaginative stories take you to the narrow limestone alleyways of Jerusalem, the desolate beauty of the Negev Desert, and the sprawling orange groves of Jaffa, with characters that spring to vivid life. A divorced con artist and his daughter sell empty bottles of “holy air” to credulous tourists; a Lebanese Scheherazade enchants three young soldiers in a bombed-out Beirut radio station; a boy daringly “rooftops” at night, climbing steel cranes in scuffed sneakers even as he reimagines the bravery of a Polish-Jewish dancer during the Holocaust; an Israeli volunteer at a West Bank checkpoint mourns the death of her son, a soldier killed in Gaza. These stories render the intimate lives of people striving for connection. They are fairy tales turned on their head by the stakes of real life, where moments of fragile intimacy mix with comedy and notes of the absurd. Told in prose of astonishing vividness that also demonstrates remarkable control and restraint, they have a universal appeal to the heart.

In The Holy Land in Observant Franciscan Texts (c. 1480–1650) Marianne Ritsema van Eck analyses the development of the complex Observant Franciscan engagement with the Holy Land during the early modern period. During these eventful centuries friars of the Franciscan establishment in Jerusalem increasingly sought to cultivate strong ideological ties between themselves and the Holy Land, participating actively in contemporary literatures of geographia sacra and Levantine pilgrimage and travel. It becomes clear how the friars constructed a collective memory using the ideological canon of their order – featuring Bonaventurian theology, marvels of the east, cartography, apocalyptic visions of history, calls for Crusade, and finally a pilgrimage-possessio of the Holy Land by Francis.

This book is the first to engage with the full range of American travel writing about nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine, and the first to acknowledge the influence of the late-eighteenth-century Barbary captivity narrative on nineteenth-century travel writing about the Middle East. Brian Yothers argues that American travel writing about the Holy Land forms a coherent, if greatly varied, tradition, which can only be fully understood when works by major writers such as Twain and Melville are studied alongside missionary accounts, captivity narratives, chronicles of religious pilgrimages, and travel writing in the genteel tradition. Yothers also examines works by lesser-known authors such as Bayard Taylor, John Lloyd Stephens, and Clorinda Minor, demonstrating that American travel writing is marked by a profound intertextuality with the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and with British and continental travel narratives about the Holy Land. His concluding chapter on Melville's Clarel shows how Melville's poem provides an incisive critique of the nascent imperial discourse discernible in the American texts with which it is in dialogue.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A deeply reported, deeply personal history of Zionism and Israel that does something few books even attempt: It balances the strength and weakness, the idealism and the brutality, the hope and the horror, that has always been at Zionism’s heart.”—Ezra Klein, The New York Times Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Ari Shavit’s riveting work, now updated with new material, draws on historical documents, interviews, and private diaries and letters, as well as his own family’s story, to create a narrative larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and of profound historical dimension. As he examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, Shavit asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can it survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. Shavit’s analysis of Israeli history provides a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.