Sacred Pilgrim, Secular Pilgrim
A Roman Journey
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
This book is part travelogue, part philosophical reflection, part historical overview, and part autobiography. Dickinson narrates his journeys to various Roman churches alongside their curious and often contradictory histories, guided by the overarching question: what does it mean to be a pilgrim, especially in the secular, pluralistic age in which we live? For him, pilgrimage takes place whenever he allows himself to be truly attentive to a specific geographical place. He listens in ways he normally does not and is transformed by measures he struggles to fathom. By engaging the practice of pilgrimage, Dickinson finds that there is no other way to connect, confront, and confess himself than by merging his physical-geographical-material nature with the theoretical and spiritual. Pilgrimage in this book is a ceaseless dialogue with everything that surrounds us, the places, people, and presences in which one immerses oneself. It is a pilgrimage out of, and even deep back into, one's own person.
Endorsements (4)
“Colby Dickinson has written a highly personal and totally original book. He begins in Santa Sabina, the building which best preserves the original shape of the early churches of Rome. What follows, as he walks around the ancient city, is a meditation on what it is to be a modern pilgrim in a time when this often merges with tourism, and what it means to be spiritual in an age which often seems to have no use for it.”
“In this profoundly poetic journey, Colby Dickinson seeks an authentic spirituality amid secular modernity. Through museums, churches, and the material ambiguity of temples that mirror inner fragility, he reveals faith as embodied and performative, finding freedom in embracing vulnerability within historical tensions. At the heart of Christendom, the pilgrim encounters a mirror of the soul where faith is reborn from the wound of disbelief, an epiphany of finitude where the sacred endures through human fragility.”
“Sacred Pilgrim, Secular Pilgrim is a superb and timely book, following not only in a centuries-long tradition of Christian pilgrimage as undertaken by many, but giving us a glimpse into the author’s recent personal pilgrim journey as framed by particular places visited in Rome. Wayfarers not only will learn from the wealth of this writer’s deep experiences, but will find here hearty food for their own interior and exterior travels.”
“This book is a broad meditative exercise on pilgrimage. Colby Dickinson experiences pilgrimages to Rome in different years and gives testimony from perspectives ranging from mystical experiences to critical views of faith intertwined with the interests of commercial tourism. The book consists of accounts of visits to temples and areas of the city, which lead the author to profound questions about religiosity, about the beauty that amazes and overwhelms admirers of the presence of faith in something, in a transcendent God. The author's reflective testimony shows that pilgrimage is not limited to travel or visiting but expresses a way of living in relationship with sacred elements. The pilgrimage is completed by meditating on what lies beyond material experience and discovering the various meanings that this relationship with the sacred brings to the pilgrim's life.”
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