For many Evangelical Christians, a trip to the Holy Land is an integral part of practicing their faith. Arriving in groups, most of these pilgrims are guided by Jewish Israeli tour guides. For more than three decades, Jackie Feldman—born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, now an Israeli citizen, scholar, and licensed guide—has been leading tours, interpreting Biblical landscapes, and fielding questions about religion and current politics. In this book, he draws on pilgrimage and tourism studies, his own experiences, and interviews with other guides, Palestinian drivers and travel agents, and Christian pastors to examine the complex interactions through which guides and tourists "co-produce" the Bible Land. He uncovers the implicit politics of travel brochures and religious souvenirs. Feldman asks what it means when Jewish-Israeli guides get caught up in their own performances or participate in Christian rituals, and reflects on how his interactions with Christian tourists have changed his understanding of himself and his views of religion.

The historic phenomenon of pilgrimage is experiencing a resurgence around the world. A journey resulting from religious causes, it not only provides a spiritual experience, but also one of new environments, cultures and peoples, and is often undertaken as a guided tour. Yet pilgrimage as a mode of tourism has been little investigated. This book adds considerably to our knowledge by focusing on one specific pilgrimage voyage - that to the Holy Land during times of security crisis there. In doing so, it examines this tourism journey in relation to constraints and high levels of risk experienced by the pilgrims. It explores both the behavioural aspects of undertaking pilgrimage to such an insecure situation and the impacts of such crisis on the host tourism infrastructure and industry. It therefore not only provides insights into pilgrimage as tourism - and into this particular country's experience - but also offers an integrative approach to tourism crisis management.

Since at least the high point of the civil rights movement, African American Christianity has been widely recognized as a potent force for social change. Most attention to the political significance of Black churches, however, focuses on domestic protest and electoral politics. Yet some Black churches take a deep interest in the global issue of Israel and Palestine. Why would African American Christians get involved—and even take sides—in Palestine and Israel, and what does that reveal about the political significance of “the Black Church” today? This book examines African American Christian involvement in Israel and Palestine to show how competing visions of “the Black Church” are changing through transnational political engagement. Considering cases ranging from African American Christian Zionists to Palestinian solidarity activists, Roger Baumann traces how Black religious politics transcend domestic arenas and enter global spaces. These cases, he argues, illuminate how the meaning of the ostensibly singular and unifying category of “the Black Church”—spanning its history, identity, culture, and mission—is deeply contested at every turn. Black Visions of the Holy Land offers new insights into how Black churches understand their political role and social significance; the ways race, religion, and politics both converge and diverge; and why the meaning of overlapping racial and religious identities shifts when moving from national to global contexts.

The fourth century is often referred to as the first Christian century, and for the Jews a period of decline and persecution. But was this change really so immediate and irreversible? What was the real impact of the Christianisation of the Roman Empire on the Jews, especially in their own land?Stemberger draws on all available sources, literary and archaeological, Christian as well as pagan and Jewish, to reconstruct the history of the different religious communities of Palestine in the fourth century.This book demonstrates how lively, creative and resourceful the Jewish communities remained.

This volume explores the ways in which interreligious encounters happen ritually. Drawing upon theology, philosophy, political sciences, anthropology, sociology, and liturgical studies, the contributors examine different concrete cases of interrituality. After an introductory chapter explaining the phenomenon of interrituality, readers learn about government-sponsored public events in Spain, the ritual life of mixed families in China and the UK. We meet Buddhist and Christian monks in Kentucky and are introduced to rituals of protest in Jerusalem. Other chapters take us to shared pilgrimage sites in the Mediterranean and explore the ritual challenges of Israeli tour guides of Christian pilgrims. The authors challenges readers to consider scriptural reasoning as a liturgical practice and to inquire into the (in)felicitous nature of rituals of reconciliation. This volume demonstrates the importance of understanding the many contexts in which interrituality happens and shows how ritual boundaries are perpetually under negotiation.

Religious Pilgrimages in the Mediterranean World examines the evolution of recent theoretical and methodological trends in pilgrimage studies. It outlines key themes of research, including historical, anthropological, sociological and cultural approaches, to provide a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the subject. Charting pilgrimages from 1500 through to the current day, the volume traces the recent research of Jewish, Muslim and Christian pilgrimages in the Mediterranean while also exploring avenues for future studies that go beyond the limitations of the past. Chapters also engage with travel literature, tourism and nationalism in relation to pilgrimage in this cutting-edge volume. Featuring essays from leading scholars in the fields of religious studies, geography and anthropology, this book is cross-cultural in focus and critical in approach, making it an essential read for all researchers of pilgrimage, religious history, religious tourism and anthropology

This book is the first to examine the depth, complexity and uniqueness of global Christian pilgrimage, travel and tourism, and how they manifest in terms of both supply and demand. It explores the places and spaces of production and consumption of this increasingly important tourism phenomenon. The volume considers the foundational elements of the attractiveness of places according to Christian thinking – spirit of place, scriptural connections, art and architecture, contrived/themed environments, programmed events, volunteer travel opportunities, and visiting local communities by way of solidarity tourism and mission work. It includes a wide range of examples from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America and will be of interest to researchers and students in religious studies, tourism, pilgrimage studies, geography, anthropology and Christianity studies.

A highly illustrated guide to Jerusalem in the award-winning DK Eyewitness Travel series

This edited volume offers a new critical approach to the study of Zionist history and Israeli-Palestinian relations, based on the encounter between history and anthropology. Informed by the anthropological method of setting large questions to intimate settings, the book examines processes of Zionist colonization, nation-building and Palestinian dispossession by focusing on encounters between members of different national, religious and ethnic groups “from below”—through paying close attention to life stories and reconstructing everyday practices and micro-histories of places and communities. Thus, it tells a complex story in which the practices of historical actors are not simply reducible to a single underlying logic of colonization, even as they participate in the production and reproduction of colonial structures. This approach effectively undermines the prevailing tendency to study national communities in isolation, projecting onto the past an essentialist and rigid separation. Rather than assuming two clearly bounded and monolithic national groups, caught from the start in perpetual conflict, this volume probes their historical production through their evolving relationships, and their varied and shifting political, social, economic and cultural manifestations. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in an array of fields, including the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations, anthropological perspectives on settler colonialism, and Zionism.

How do Christians make relationships with land central to their faith? How have the realities of materiality, geography, and ecology shaped Christian territories of belonging and theologies of territory? What social-economic-political conditions surround exchanges between religion and nature? This book explores how Christianity intersects with nature to create unique religious landscapes. Case studies range from the Mormon Trail across the USA completed by thousands every year, to the Catholic devotional cult of and shrine to St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina. Contributors examine the entangled forms of agency between nature and culture that are at work as Christians produce, consume, experience, imagine, inhabit, manage, and struggle over formations of land. Focusing on Christian engagements with land forms in the early 21st century, this book advances the spatial turn in the study of religion, contributes to the anthropology of religion and the study of global Christianities, as well as our understanding of the relationship between Christianity, space and place.