On Glory Roads: A Pilgrim's Book About Pilgrimage - Softcover

Munro, Eleanor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0500275009 ISBN 13: 9780500275009

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1988

Synopsis

An art critic recalls her visits to a number of monuments associated with pilgrimage, traces major historical and scriptural pilgrimage themes, and describes the works of art and rites such pilgrimages inspired

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Convinced that going on pilgrimage is a universally shared ritual almost as old as humankind, art critic Munro herself goes on pilgrimages to India, Indonesia, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostella in northwestern Spain, the centers of four of the world's major religions, describing the myths on which they were founded and the rites, arts and monuments they have generated. Writing for a small, highly educated audience, she shows thatbased as they are on our earliest observations of the heavensmany subsequent beliefs, ideas, symbols, ceremonies and buildings are a consequence of the need of humans to view themselves in relation to the stars, to the cosmos, to eternity. Asking "Does our sense of things reflect their nature or only the nature of our need?" she concludes that "people need to feel they are on a journey that rises out of the past while preserving its connections with it, in order to rise out of the way of hopeless death."
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Art critic Munro has penned a marvelously poetic meditation on the nature of religious pilgrimage. Part autobiography, part travel essay, part history, part an account of ancient myths, this unique and highly informative book contains Munro's reflections as she visits four sacred locales: Banaras in India, the Buddhist monument of Borobudur in Indonesia, Jerusalem, and Compostella in Spain. Along the way she delights the reader with her insightful exploration of the religious and artistic symbols that animate these sacred locales. Her description derives coherence and density from a set of intriguing theories developed in archeo- and ethno-astronomy. This book deserves to be read widely by both specialists and lay readers.Paul E. Muller-Ortega, Religious Studies Dept., Michigan State Univ., East Lansing
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0500275009
• ISBN 13: 9780500275009
• Binding: Paperback