Since the 1950s, millions of American Christians have traveled to the Holy Land to visit places in Israel and the Palestinian territories associated with Jesus's life and death. Why do these pilgrims choose to journey halfway around the world? How do they react to what they encounter, and how do they understand the trip upon return? This book places the answers to these questions into the context of broad historical trends, analyzing how the growth of mass-market evangelical and Catholic pilgrimage relates to changes in American Christian theology and culture over the last sixty years, including shifts in Jewish-Christian relations, the growth of small group spirituality, and the development of a Christian leisure industry. Drawing on five years of research with pilgrims before, during and after their trips, Walking Where Jesus Walked offers a lived religion approach that explores the trip's hybrid nature for pilgrims themselves: both ordinary--tied to their everyday role as the family's ritual specialists, and extraordinary--since they leave home in a dramatic way, often for the first time. Their experiences illuminate key tensions in contemporary US Christianity between material evidence and transcendent divinity, commoditization and religious authority, domestic relationships and global experience. Hillary Kaell crafts the first in-depth study of the cultural and religious significance of American Holy Land pilgrimage after 1948. The result sheds light on how Christian pilgrims, especially women, make sense of their experience in Israel-Palestine, offering an important complement to top-down approaches in studies of Christian Zionism and foreign policy.

An exploration of how ordinary U.S. Christians create global connections through the multibillion-dollar child sponsorship industry Child sponsorship emerged from nineteenth-century Protestant missions to become one of today's most profitable private fund-raising tools in organizations including World Vision, Compassion International, and ChildFund. Investigating two centuries of sponsorship and its related practices in American living rooms, churches, and shopping malls, Christian Globalism at Home reveals the myriad ways that Christians who don't travel outside of the United States cultivate global sensibilities. Kaell traces the movement of money, letters, and images, along with a wide array of sponsorship's lesser-known embodied and aesthetic techniques, such as playacting, hymn singing, eating, and fasting. She shows how, through this process, U.S. Christians attempt to hone globalism of a particular sort by oscillating between the sensory experiences of a God's eye view and the intimacy of human relatedness. These global aspirations are buoyed by grand hopes and subject to intractable limitations, since they so often rely on the inequities they claim to redress. Based on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Christian Globalism at Home explores how U.S. Christians imagine and experience the world without ever leaving home.

An exploration of how ordinary U.S. Christians create global connections through the multibillion-dollar child sponsorship industry Child sponsorship emerged from nineteenth-century Protestant missions to become one of today's most profitable private fund-raising tools in organizations including World Vision, Compassion International, and ChildFund. Investigating two centuries of sponsorship and its related practices in American living rooms, churches, and shopping malls, Christian Globalism at Home reveals the myriad ways that Christians who don't travel outside of the United States cultivate global sensibilities. Kaell traces the movement of money, letters, and images, along with a wide array of sponsorship's lesser-known embodied and aesthetic techniques, such as playacting, hymn singing, eating, and fasting. She shows how, through this process, U.S. Christians attempt to hone globalism of a particular sort by oscillating between the sensory experiences of a God's eye view and the intimacy of human relatedness. These global aspirations are buoyed by grand hopes and subject to intractable limitations, since they so often rely on the inequities they claim to redress. Based on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Christian Globalism at Home explores how U.S. Christians imagine and experience the world without ever leaving home.

Since the 1950s, millions of American Christians have traveled to the Holy Land to visit places in Israel and the Palestinian territories associated with Jesus's life and death. Why do these pilgrims choose to journey halfway around the world? How do they react to what they encounter, and how do they understand the trip upon return? This book places the answers to these questions into the context of broad historical trends, analyzing how the growth of mass-market evangelical and Catholic pilgrimage relates to changes in American Christian theology and culture over the last sixty years, including shifts in Jewish-Christian relations, the growth of small group spirituality, and the development of a Christian leisure industry.Drawing on five years of research with pilgrims before, during and after their trips, Walking Where Jesus Walked offers a lived religion approach that explores the trip's hybrid nature for pilgrims themselves: both ordinary--tied to their everyday role as the family's ritual specialists, and extraordinary--since they leave home in a dramatic way, often for the first time. Their experiences illuminate key tensions in contemporary US Christianity between material evidence and transcendent divinity, commoditization and religious authority, domestic relationships and global experience.Hillary Kaell crafts the first in-depth study of the cultural and religious significance of American Holy Land pilgrimage after 1948. The result sheds light on how Christian pilgrims, especially women, make sense of their experience in Israel-Palestine, offering an important complement to top-down approaches in studies of Christian Zionism and foreign policy.

Over the last decade there has been ongoing discussion about the place of religion in Quebecois society, particularly following the proposed Charter of Quebec Values in 2013. The essays in Everyday Sacred emerged from this active and often tense period of debate. Revitalizing an awareness of how people encounter, create, and employ religion in everyday life, contributors to this volume explore communities' networks of beliefs, traditions, and relationships. Through broad comparisons beyond the Quebec context, contributors look at African Pentecostal congregations, an Iraqi Jewish community in Montreal, a rural Catholic parish on the Saint Lawrence River, and Tewehikan drumming in Wemotaci. They also examine wayside crosses, places of pilgrimage and devotion, debates on the regulation of the hijab, and the place of Montreal Spiritualists and transhumanists in the religious landscape. Seeking a holistic definition of Quebecois religion, Everyday Sacred considers religious and secular identity, pluralism, the bodily and material aspects of religion, the impact of gender on community and the public sphere, and the rise of hybridity, sociality, and new technologies in transnational and online networks, in order to uncover the transmission of practices and beliefs from one generation to another. Disrupting familiar dichotomies between Catholicism and other religions, "founders" and immigrants, new religious movements and traditional institutions, Everyday Sacred marks the beginning of a sustained conversation on contemporary religion in Quebec, both inside and outside of the province. Contributors include: Emma Anderson (University of Ottawa), Randall Balmer (Dartmouth College), Helene Charron (Universite Laval), Elysia Guzik (University of Toronto), Laurent Jerome (Universite du Quebec a Montreal), Norma B. Joseph (Concordia University), Cory Andrew Labrecque (Universite Laval), Deirdre Meintel (Universite de Montreal), Geraldine Mossiere (Universite de Montreal), Frederic Parent (Universite de Quebec a Montreal), Meena Sharify-Funk (Wilfrid Laurier University).