As the course handout has been emailed to enrollees in 717 Pilgrimage and Human Society, I thought I should post a few lines for those who might take a look at the blog before the class begins. Later in the week I expect to post an outline for the first session, and I shall post outlines a day or two before each session. Throughout the term, the blog will be used to post materials prior to class sessions including the session outlines, to answer questions and respond to comments that I am unprepared to answer on the spot, and to post additional materials that enrollees might find of interest.
Pilgrimage is an activity found throughout the world under the rubric of all major religious creeds, and huge numbers of people make pilgrimages each year. Some go short distances to local shrines while others cover great distances, sometimes in difficult conditions, in order to visit one important shrine or another. Over the 8 weeks of the course we are going to examine the social character of religious pilgrimages, ones undertaken in various parts of the world and by members of a number of religious creeds. This is a course to examine pilgrimage as an aspect of human society, and it is not a course in theology. We shall briefly introduce aspects of theology significant to pilgrimage, for example the requirement that good Muslims make the Hajj or the strong encouragement of Roman Catholics to visit some of the major shrines of their creed. But our goal is not to understand the religion per se. Rather we shall try to understand the kinds of places that attract pilgrims and some of the consequences of those pilgrimages. This is also not a course in the psychology of pilgrimage, an important subject but not one I am prepared to teach. As the course description in the ALRI catalogue suggested, this is a course with a social science bias, but we shall also look at some of the humanistic aspects of pilgrimage, and one session will be devoted to the fine arts and pilgrimage. There is a glorious legacy of pilgrimages in great art, architecture, music and literature, and any student of pilgrimage should be made aware of it.
For a sense of where this course is going, you are invited to look at earlier postings on this blog which was originally started for a similar course at OLLI in Fairfax in the Spring of 2009. The outline for this autumn is a modified version of the one I used last spring.
Pilgrimage is a vast subject, there is a huge literature on it in a variety of languages (only a few of which I am able to read), and any course of only 8 sessions can, at best, try to introduce some of the more important and interesting ideas on the subject. While I have devoted a great deal of time and effort to understanding pilgrimage, I know that I have an immense amount still to learn. I welcome any suggestions of materials, including books, articles, pictures, music, and various forms of internet content that I might find of interest or useful in preparing future editions of this course. Please subscribe to the blog for the remainder of the term and submit questions and comments as we pass through the autumn.
Another Reading Suggestion I should have included on the handout:
A good overview of religiously motivated pilgrimages is provided by a well-illustrated book available at the Fairfax County Public Library (and probably at other public libraries) and the George Mason University Library:
Coleman, Simon and Elsner, John. 1995. Pilgrimage: Past and Present in the World Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-66765-4. LCCC BL619.P5C65 1995.
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