Do you need to travel to the ends of the earth to find a thin place?
Theology, 129(4), 247-254.
The dramatic rise in pilgrimage has led to an increasing interest in thin places – spiritual thresholds between the material-human world and the divine. The popular portrayal of thin places often has a focus on landscapes: remote islands, isolated churches, ancient ruins and secluded forests. Many of these are also in fairly inaccessible locations. This article explores what can be described as a thin place, from a variety of angles (theological, philosophical and psychological), and examines what makes them special or sacred, as well as who decides this. It then explores what this means for individuals who wish to find a place that is ‘set apart’. It concludes that the search for a thin place is not always for somewhere glorious at the end of a long pilgrimage. It can simply be a place near at hand but away from the day-to-day, not necessarily a traditional religious space but a place that has meaning for the individual and enables them to ‘be in conversation’.
You can find the paper here – https://doi.org/10.1177/0040571X261457893
Exploring models of reflective practice to aid the understanding of pilgrimage experience”
International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage: Vol. 13: Iss. 1, Article 10.
This paper explores the use of models of reflective practice to aid reflection and sense making for a walking pilgrimage experience and analyses the challenges of using such a model in this context. The paper then examines whether Greenia’s definition of pilgrimage experience can be used as a model to aid reflection. This is subsequently applied to a 5-day walking pilgrimage experience and its effectiveness assessed.
You can find the article here – https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ijrtp/vol13/iss1/10/
Medium
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