How much do you know about pilgrimages?

Pilgrimage: A Very Short Introduction

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By Ian Reader
September 18^th 2015

Pilgrimage has been celebrated in literature from The Canterbury Tales to Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage. Pilgrims in funny hats and buckled shoes play an outsized role in the American national mythos, but pilgrimage traditions encompass much more than the Puritans. From medieval Japan, where the first pilgrimage package tours were offered, to modern-day Mecca, which welcomes 30 million pilgrims for the annual hajj, to Africa, Latin America, and beyond, pilgrimage is a global phenomenon.

Test your knowledge of pilgrimages throughout history, across religions, and around the world.

[qzzr quiz=”90341″ width=”100%” height=”auto” redirect=”true” offset=”0″]

Quiz image credit: Pilgrimage Church, by ADD. Public domain via Pixabay.

Headline image credit: Kataragama, female devotees. Photo by Arian Zwegers. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

Ian Reader is a Professor of Religious Studies at Lancaster University. He has held several previous positions at other universities, including the University of Manchester, UK; the Nordic Institute for Asian Studies, Denmark; the University of Hawaii, USA; and Kansai Gaidai University, Japan. He has published several books and numerous articles on Japanese religious dynamics and practices, including Making Pilgrimages: Meaning and Practice in Shikoku (University of Hawaii Press, 2005), Pilgrimage in the Marketplace (Routledge, 2013), an edited volume Pilgrimage in the Japanese Tradition (with Paul L. Swanson, as a special edition of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 1997), and several journal articles and book chapters. He is also the author of Pilgrimage: A Very Short Introduction.

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Pilgrimage: A Very Short Introduction

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