The Aug. 13 edition of The Living Church is available online to registered subscribers.
In this edition, Hannah Matis — assistant professor of church history at Virginia Theological Seminary — writes about a hiking pilgrimage in North Wales:
Last July, I spent about two weeks walking the North Wales Pilgrim’s Way. The North Wales Way approximates an old medieval pilgrimage route between Holywell, down the Llyn Peninsula to Aberdaron, culminating at the island of Bardsey — more properly Ynys Enlli, to give it its Welsh name, often referred to simply as Enlli.
The present route, stitched together from public footpaths and existing trails, has not been continuous for very long, and in part I want to write about the experience simply to bring greater attention to the route. Most people, if they have an interest in pilgrimage, gravitate inevitably (and understandably) toward the Camino, the great network of routes across southern France to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, to the extent that “The Way” has become, if anything, somewhat overtraveled of late. There are other places to go, with as rich a history, as the British Pilgrimage Trust has recently argued. Besides, even for Camino veterans, pilgrimage can become strangely addictive, as Martin Sheen discovers in his son’s film The Way. Once in the mindset, all endpoints are arbitrary: the road goes ever on and on, and you’re never really done.
News
- Analysis: Sustained, Meticulous, Devastating
- ‘Free from the Smoke’
- Waves of Fallout from Abuse
Features
- Bridge-builder Returns Home | By G. Jeffrey MacDonald
- In the Tides | By Hannah Matis
Cultures
- In a Tongue Understood by the People | By Robyn Douglass
Books
- Augustine | Review by Jeremy W. Bergstrom
Other Departments
- Cæli enarrant
- Sunday’s Readings
- People & Places
