Sigismund Suevus (1526–1596)

The sixth chapter focuses on the continual presence of Catholics and the shared use of formerly Catholic spaces. Sigismund Suevus (1526–1596), a Lutheran preacher from Lauban, engaged in a conflict with the nuns of the Order of Mary Magdalen in Lauban. As town preacher, he denounced the conversion of one of Lauban’s mayors to Catholicism, but he continued to share a church with the nuns and any remaining Catholics. These shared spaces challenge our understanding of confessional markers, as Lutherans continued to have side altars or images of saints in their part of the church. Moreover, the nuns were linked to the Lutheran preachers through daily interactions. Although Suevus rejected Catholicism in his sermons, he also reinterpreted Catholic space in Reformation terms, especially the Holy Sepulchre in Görlitz, a reproduction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. He advocated a spiritual pilgrimage to this space and used objects connected to travel as allegories of Lutheranism.

Apocalyptic Geographies

In nineteenth-century America, “apocalypse” referred not to the end of the world but to sacred revelation, and “geography” meant both the physical landscape and its representation in printed maps, atlases, and pictures. This book explores how white Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to present the antebellum landscape as a “sacred space” of spiritual pilgrimage, and how devotional literature influenced secular society in important and surprising ways. Reading across genres and media — including religious tracts and landscape paintings, domestic fiction and missionary memoirs, slave narratives and moving panoramas — the book illuminates intersections of popular culture, the physical spaces of an expanding and urbanizing nation, and the spiritual narratives that ordinary Americans used to orient their lives. Placing works of literature and visual art — from Thomas Cole's The Oxbow to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Henry David Thoreau's Walden — into new contexts, the book traces the rise of evangelical media, the controversy and backlash it engendered, and the role it played in shaping American modernity.

The Routes of Intransigence:Mexico's ‘Spiritual Pilgrimage’ of 1874 and the Globalization of Ultramontane Catholicism

In the fall of 1874, in the midst a particularly severe round of Church-state conflict, Mexico's archbishop, Pelagio Antonio Labastida y Dávalos, introduced a novel weapon in the Catholic Church's struggle against liberal anticlericalism. He had sought and obtained a special dispensation from Pope Pius IX for all Mexicans to participate in a “spiritual pilgrimage,” a month-long exercise of mental travel, prayer, and contemplation that would figuratively transport the faithful out of Mexico's anticlerical milieu and into the purified air of Jerusalem, Rome, and other Old World holy sites, where they would pray for divine intercession on behalf of the embattled Church. The practice had been inaugurated a year earlier by lay Catholics in Bologna, as a response to the prohibition of mass pilgrimages in the flesh in the former Papal States. Labastida y Dávalos felt that spiritual pilgrimage could be especially effective in Mexico, where the anticlerical government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada had embarked on a radical program of secularization. In fact, the recently codified Laws of Reform had likewise prohibited acts of public religiosity in Mexico, attempting thus to suppress the myriad local processions and mass pilgrimages that helped to define Mexican Catholicism.

The hippie as pilgrim

The chapter starts by recounting the story of ‘George’, who travelled to India and found a faith. Some historical contextualisation is given: the decline of Christian beliefs and practices in the UK and USA after 1945 is considered. There were precedents to spiritual searches in the East: in the nineteenth century both Egypt and Tibet were seen as lands which held mystical truths. The rise of new forms of religion in the West, such as Buddhism, is considered. It is argued that these religions had a particular force in the USA. The appeal of Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism is considered. On the other hand, there was a groundswell of religious scepticism among some travellers. In conclusion, it is argued that the hippy trail should be considered as a form of secular, possibly spiritual, pilgrimage.

A Catholic Pyramid?

The pyramid of Merkinė, constructed by Povilas Žėkas in the southern part of Lithuania in 2002, began within the Lithuanian Roman Catholic milieu only to develop years later into an independent religious movement. In this article, I analyze the history and development of the pyramid in light of changes affecting religions in Lithuania during the last twenty-five years of religious liberty. I will examine the binding relationship of religion, nationalism, and resistance in Lithuania as the Pyramid of Merkinė became a place of spiritual pilgrimage, connecting the religious life of Communist and post-Communist Lithuanian society.

Rupert Brooke’s Neo-Paganism

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) embodies the myth of the Great War but after his sudden death his war poems tended to be disapproved of. His pre war Georgian lines are also dismissed on account of their effete pestoralism and alleged escapism. It seemed as if both the critics and the audience simply failed to understand the subtext of his poems that reveals a magnificent spiritual pilgrimage undertaken by a poet in the age of anxiety. In search of the calm point of his tumultuous universe Brook varies different symbolic patterns and groups of symbols thus disclosing the lasting change of his poetic sensibility that range from purely pagan denial of urban values and the unrestrained blasphemy up to the true Christian piety. Our analysis affirms him the true modernist poet, a cosmopolitan mind, always apt to accumulate new experiences and it is certain that his work will be seen in quite a new light in the decades to come.