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In
Walking the Way Together, Jenkins shares stories of parents and their young adult children who walk the Camino de Santiago, revealing their hopes, goals, and the challenges they face as they attempt to connect on this spiritual journey together. This ethnography illustrates contemporary pilgrimage as a method of individual and relational change, the potential for shared pilgrimage to build a social consciousness, and the impact of digital technologies on these efforts.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction
- I. Planning the Mysterious
- 2. Camino Promises
- 3. Spiritual Intimacies
- 4. Intimacy and Disciplining Technology
- 5. Connective Memories
- Conclusion: Engaged Spiritual Sensibilities
- Methods Appendix
- Sources
- Index
About the author
Kathleen E. Jenkins is Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at William & Mary where she teaches courses on qualitative methods, social theory, sociology of religion, and sociology of families. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Brandeis University and her BA/MA in Religious Studies from Brown University. Jenkins is the author of Sacred Divorce: Religion, Therapeutic Culture, and Ending Life Partnerships (2014), and Awesome Families: The Promise of Healing Relationships in the International Churches of Christ (2005).
Summary
In Walking the Way Together, Kathleen Jenkins offers an up-close study of parents and their adult children who walk the Camino de Santiago together. A Catholic visitation site of medieval origins with walking paths across Europe, the Camino culminates at the shrine of Saint James in the city of Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, an autonomous region of Spain. It has become a popular point of religious tourism for Catholics, spiritual seekers, scholars, adventurers, and cultural tourists. In 2019, well over 300,000 people arrived at the Pilgrims Office seeking a certificate of completion; they had walked anywhere from one hundred to over eight hundred kilometers.
Jenkins brings alive family stories of investing in pilgrimage as a practice for strengthening kin relationships and becoming a part of each other's emotional and spiritual lives. The social and spiritual encounters that either supported or inhibited these relational goals emerge as fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters describe walking for six hours or more each day over mountain, rural, and urban paths. They are stories of pleasant surprises, disappointments, lessons learned, and the far-reaching emotional power that the memory of ritual failures and successes can carry. Ultimately, they show the potential for pilgrimage to foster and maintain intimate ties in today's fragile world, to build an engaged social consciousness, and to encourage reflection on digital devices and social medium platforms in the pursuit of spirituality.
Additional text
Kathleen Jenkins's book is superb. While it explores pilgrimage and its transformative effects, it also freshly analyzes pilgrims' intentions, preparations, and family structures. Her ethnographic research adds much to Camino studies.
