The Last Pilgrimage

Linda Daly had a seemingly charmed life: her mother Nancy was married to the head of Warner Bros, and her parents were one of the most influential and prominent couples in Los Angeles. Even their divorce couldn't test the bond between mother and daughter, and their family grew: her mother married Dick Riordan, mayor of L.A.; her father married songwriter Carole Bayer Sager. The extended family used their combined resources to help a number of cultural and philanthropic concerns across the country until they encountered the one thing they could not overcome: Nancy's diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer. So mother and daughter teamed up to begin a search for a miracle cure—a roller–coaster ride through the rigors of western medicine, the surgeries and chemotherapies, and the untested boundaries of alternative medicine. What Linda learned on their final pilgrimage together would change her forever and speaks to the issues faced by many adult sons and daughters today: how to help those who gave you life face the end of their own. Ultimately, The Last Pilgrimage is Linda's love letter to her mother, proof that the end of life can offer a peaceful and comforting farewell.

With the advent of the reformation, concepts of living and dying were profoundly reconfigured. As purgatory disappeared from the spiritual landscape, other paths to the afterlife were rediscovered. Thus, when life draws to a close, the passage to the afterlife becomes a last pilgrimage, a popular early modern metaphor that has received little critical commentary. In a rigorous historical and theological reading, Cyril L. Caspar explores five major English poets - John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, George Herbert, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton - to unveil the poetical potential of the last pilgrimage as a life-transcending metaphor.

How shall we spend our God-gift of an extra three decades? The Last Third of life (age 60 and beyond) offers significant challenges that Thibault and Morgan propose we approach as a pilgrimage. Their scripture-based meditations and reflection questions examine 7 tasks essential to living the Last Third fearlessly and with purpose:

From the author of the international bestseller, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, comes another exquisite and emotionally resonant novel about the search for the truth and unconditional love. On a foggy spring morning in 1972, twelve-year-old Byron Hemming and his mother are driving to school in the English countryside. On the way, in a life-changing two seconds, an accident occurs. Or does it? Byron is sure it happened, but his mother, sitting right next to him in the car, has no reaction to it. Over the course of the days and weeks that follow, Byron embarks on a journey to discover what really happened--or didn't--that fateful morning when everything changed. It is a journey that will take him--a loveable and cloistered twelve-year-old boy with a loveable and cloistered twelve-year-old boy's perspective on life--into the murkier, more difficult realities of the adult world, where people lie, fathers and mothers fight without words, and even unwilling boys must become men. Byron will have to reconcile the dueling realities of that summer, a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit and the power of compassion.

In the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem many pilgrims came to Jerusalem. The translations in this book are of seventeen western accounts of pilgrimage, written between 1099 and 1185, and there are two additional accounts from eastern pilgrims, Abbot Daniel from Russia and John Phocas from Antioch. As a whole this collection shows the gradually developing way in which western Christians understood the Holy Places. Some early pilgrims depended on authorities, many of whom by 1099 were out-of-date. They tried to deliver the truth about the Holy Places and to be reticent about their own reactions. But the pilgrims who appear later in the collections made their own archaeological judgements, and were more free about their own reactions. Pilgrimage after 1099 was altered by the fact that by their victory over Jerusalem the Dome of the Rock fell into the Crusader's hands. Otherwise the differences of practice between eastern and western pilgrims were slight. Thus eastern pilgrims visited the Greek and western pilgrims the Latin monasteries. Western pilgrims had a different idea of the location of Emmaus, and before 1185 a western Way of the Cross was beginning to take shape. These were slight differences, and in general all Christian pilgrims, whether from east or west, visited the same Holy Places as they had during the preceding period. Most of the works in this collection were translated into English a century ago by the Palestine Pilgrim's Text Society. But these texts were produced separately as pamphlets, and lacked a general introduction. In this book therefore the texts are retranslated, sometimes from more accurate texts. In introducing the texts some valuable new evidence from archaeology has been used and enabled a new assessment of their dates.

For many in the Middle Ages, pilgrimages were seen to represent a clear risk of moral and religious perdition for women, and they were strongly discouraged from making them; this exhortation would have been universally disseminated and generally followed, except, of course, in the case of the virtuous ‘extraordinary women’, such as saints and queens. Women and Pilgrimage in Medieval Galicia represents an analysis of the social history of women based on documentary sources and physical evidence, breaking away from literary and historiographical stereotypes, while at the same time contributing to a critical assessment of the myth that medieval women were kept hidden away from the world. As the chapters here show, women - and not only those ‘extraordinary women’, but also women from other social strata - became pilgrims and travelled the paths that led from their homes to the most important Christian shrines, especially - although not exclusively - Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela. It can be seen that medieval women were actively involved in this ritualistic expression of devotion, piety, sacrifice or penitence. This situation is thoroughly documented in this multidisciplinary book, with emphasis both on the pilgrimages abroad from Galicia and on the pilgrimages to the shrine of St James at Compostela.

The study of pilgrimage often centres itself around miracles and spontaneous populist activities. While some of these activities and stories may play an important role in the emergence of potential pilgrimage sites and in helping create wider interest in them, this book demonstrates that the dynamics of the marketplace, including marketing and promotional activities by priests and secular interest groups, create the very consumerist markets through which pilgrimages become established and successful – and through which the ‘sacred’ as a category can be sustained. By drawing on examples from several contexts, including Japan, India, China, Vietnam, Europe, and the Muslim world, author Ian Reader evaluates how pilgrimages may be invented, shaped, and promoted by various interest groups. In so doing he draws attention to the competitive nature of the pilgrimage market, revealing that there are rivalries, borrowed ideas, and alliances with commercial and civil agencies to promote pilgrimages. The importance of consumerism is demonstrated, both in terms of consumer goods/souvenirs and pilgrimage site selection, rather than the usual depictions of consumerism as tawdry disjunctions on the ‘sacred.’ As such this book reorients studies of pilgrimage by highlighting not just the pilgrims who so often dominate the literature, but also the various other interest groups and agencies without whom pilgrimage as a phenomenon would not exist.