American Catholic Travelers to the Holy Land 1861-1929 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review: \u27Inventing the Holy Land: American Protestant Pilgrimage to Palestine, 1865–1941\u27
2012
Stephanie Stidham Rogers examines American Protestant tourism in Palestine from 1865, when travel to the Middle East from the United States began to take off, until the onset of World War II. Using thirty-five pilgrimage narratives as the basis of her study—and it would have been helpful to have a separate and annotated bibliographical section for these narratives—Rogers discusses how American Protestant visitors were troubled by the poverty and filth, dismayed by the ubiquity of Catholic and Orthodox shrines, and outraged by the role of Muslims in administering Christian holy sites. In response, these pilgrims worked “to create a Holy Land that was more biblical, or more Protestant” (p. 4). By the end of the nineteenth century, this vision of biblical Palestine occupied an important place in American Protestantism, with the frequent inclusion of Holy Land maps and photographs of Palestine in Bibles (in contrast with Rogers’s book, which contains neither maps nor photographs), and w...
Theology Today, 2018
American Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land started within a historical and ideological context shaped by American territorial expansionism. The settler-colonial impulses informing that expansionism were carried to Palestine, where Palestinians were encountered as ''savages'' compared explicitly to American Indians. Erasure of the Holy Land's Indigenous inhabitants is thus sanctioned. Herman Melville's Clarel and Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad record this encounter. We must be aware of this history if it is not to be repeated in contemporary pilgrimage practices.
Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, 2013
Rich in historical details and artistic illustrations of the Near East and the Holy Land, the selected accounts of journeys and pilgrimages written by European and American Christians (Catholic and Protestant) provide numerous and broad sets of views, landscapes, sketches and scenarios. This article analyses them in order to define and point out the structure and the ratio of organizing and cataloguing these “epic” stories, and their relationship and connection with the socio-political dimension of the time. In particular, this article analyses the concept and the image produced by Christian missionaries and travelers of various affiliations, thus identifying similarities and differences between their visions of the Holy Land and pointing out to what extent they contributed to the creation of an univocal “Christian” image of the Holy Land during the 19th century and/or there were perceptible and significant divergences.
MacDavidification? Making the holy land look right for American Protestant pilgrims
Long Abstract The Holy Land and Zion have fueled the American imagination since Puritan times. If Biblical visions of Zion shaped pioneers' understandings of America, the visions of the frontier constitute many American Protestants' expectations of Israel. Their ways of viewing and experiencing the Holy Land are conditioned through the reading of the Bible, as well as through model cities and media images diffused throughout the USA. Practices such as in situ Bible reading, the search for uncluttered nature, the viewing of the land from broad vistas, the adulation of technological progress, the penchant for archaeology and Orientalism all inscribe American Protestant understandings on the land to produce a textualized sacred landscape. By examining the theming of Protestant sacred sites in Israel, the narrative techniques of Jewish-Israeli guides working with American Protestant pilgrims, and the itineraries of tour companies catering to the American Christian market, we demonstrate how the Holy Land is tailored to the American Protestant gaze. The theme sites and guiding techniques reflect contemporary processes, such as the salience of media images, and the increased importance of sensory experiences in forming contemporary American identity. Yet such sites and guiding narratives are oriented, not to provide thrills, but to develop meaningful relationships with God, the Bible, and the past. The products and performances employed increase the authority of new religious tour sites, while generating political support for the State of Israel. We also demonstrate how alternative organizations employ related tropes and techniques to garner American Christian support for the Palestinian cause.