For a historian of religion, Christian pilgrimage offers a perfect example of how religious ideals and practices are reimagined and transformed in response to the changing historical and cultural context. This dynamic displays itself in a particularly interesting way in modernity, with its advent of mass communication and transportation, as well as other economic and socio-political changes. This article discusses some of the resultant changes in the practice of and perspectives on pilgrimage in late-nineteenth-century Russia as seen through the lens of a popular religious journal of the era, Russian Pilgrim. As the first commercial mass publication devoted solely to this subject, Russian Pilgrim was highly instrumental not only in providing its readers with information about pilgrimage places, practices, and travel procedures, but also in shaping their perceptions of what constituted a good pilgrimage. The paper includes close reading of selected materials from the journal, as well as an accompanying analysis of the debates on the value and meaning of modern mass pilgrimage reflected in these examples.
This essay is an exploration of the ascetic functions and possibilities of “spiritual exegesis.” By applying interdisciplinary performance theory to the writings of a key late ancient ascetic theorist, Gregory of Nyssa, it develops an understanding of spiritual exegesis as a textual performance enacting the ascetical agenda of transformation of the self. I argue that an act of interpretive engagement with Scripture in Gregory’s writings does more than offer a conceptual context for and a mythopoetic authentication of the ascetic praxis. It also encourages a reorientation of the reader’s habitual perceptions, of the text that one encounters and of oneself. By staging a process of an imaginative layering and stripping of identities and pulling the audience into the construction of a shared symbolic reality, this exegetical performance induces an experience of alternative realities and selves.
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