Walking Where Jesus Walked

This book shows us how Holy Land pilgrimage is embedded in the everyday lives of pilgrims, before and after their trip. But it also does much more. We learn how the Holy Land occupies a powerful place in the American religious imagination, and examine what it means to be Protestant or Catholic in an age of contested modernity. -- Simon Coleman,University of Toronto
With this fine book, readers are treated to a fascinating intellectual journey, following American Catholics and Protestants on pilgrimage, in quest of the place where Jesus walked. Kaell's ethnography reveals who they are, why they go, and what they find. Her answers illuminate the rich intercultural, commercial, and sensory encounters that organize the modern pilgrim's experience. Bolstered by a solid sense of history, clear prose, and an eye for the telling detail, Kaell's account richly contributes to the interdisciplinary study of American religion. -- David Morgan,Duke University
Offers an intimate and searching account of the experience of contemporary American Protestant and Catholic pilgrims to the Holy Land. Kaell made the journeys with them, beginning in their homes as they made the decision to go, and her attentiveness to what the pilgrimsin particular the older women who comprise the majority of such tour groupstold her en route about their lives, their fears and their hopes, gives the book an extraordinary depth of analysis and understanding. Because pilgrims travels are always as much internal as they are geographical, Walking Where Jesus Walked opens out to examine important questions concerning how women in the United States confront issues of aging, loss, sickness, and shifting family roles and responsibilities. Written with exceptional narrative grace and critical insight, this book is a model of ethnographic research in the study of religion. -- Robert A. Orsi,Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies, Northwestern University
Afascinating and sensitive look at Catholic and Evangelical Protestant travelers to the biblical origin of their faith. * Marginalia Review of Books *
Hillary KaellsWalking Where Jesus Walkedsheds a fascinating light on the individual experiences of Christian pilgrims from the United States as they travel to the Holy Land of Israel and the Palestinian territories and return home. * American Ethnologist *
Clearly its strengths lie not in generalization or the sociological big picture, but in the personal accounts, richly presented, empathetically caught, and traced over several years with a number of individuals, which form its substance. The result is a revealing, sometimes moving portrait of confronting the & other and making sense of the events of life in relation to that. * Catholic Historical Review *
Kaell assembles a thoughtful, well-written, and well-argued study of Christian pilgrimage in the modern US. * Choice *