Jackie Stallworth - Outside Reading 3

 I read a really interesting article from the New York Times, it talked about a variety of things relating to pilgrims such as, how veterans often do pilgrimages, despite being injured or even in wheelchairs. It mentioned that UN study that one of three tourists is a pilgrim, which I thought was cool because I never expected the UN to have an International Congress on Tourism and Pilgrimage, which is where the study was shown.

The article also mentioned that the word pilgrim has different meanings for different religions. for example in Arabic, the word for pilgrimage is hajj, which comes from the Hebrew word that means celebration, and in 2013, more than two million Muslims did a hajj.

There was a part I found pretty funny, the author wrote that the most common thing about faith that you hear nowadays is, “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” I thought this was so funny because I know so many people who say that when they either are very clearly religious, or they don’t understand was spirituality is. For example, my mom, and most of her family, goes to church almost every Sunday, she does her rosary every morning, she says a prayer before eating dinner, but she considers herself spiritual even though she doesn’t act like it. She doesn’t focus on her own beliefs it's always connected to the organized belief system of the Catholic church, she never talks about the meaning the life, and she would never go on a pilgrimage, all of which I associate with spirituality. 

In addition, the author talks about the encounters her had on the pilgrimages he’s been on, including on the Shikou pilgrimage in Japan, or the stories of other pilgrims he’s met. Some have taken pilgrimages that were not religious but in order to find an answer or connection.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/sunday-review/the-new-allure-of-sacred-pilgrimages.html 

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