Pilgrimage and beyond : going places, far and away

Also available at: Arrow, TU Dublin, https://arrow.tudublin.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1619&context=ijrtpGoing Places and Far & Away are two main issues of interest in this volume, generated from our 7th Global Sacred Journeys Conference, but our first digital or remote conference entitled Pilgrimage and Beyond. Originally, the plan had been to convene in lovely Piran, Slovenia, hosted at the University of Primorska, from 29 June to 1 July 2020. A common saying is that the plan will never survive the battle, and so it was that Covid-19 did indeed upset the applecart. We had to resort to holding Sacred Journeys 7 via a digital platform in the same summer of 2020. Thanks to great efforts, especially those of Chadwick Co Sy Su and Ian McIntosh, we managed to create a memorable event, spread out over a couple of days. The fruit of these efforts are presented here, split in two sections, Going Places and Far and Away, since both phenomena walk along the same path, albeit in different dimensions. Although many papers on pilgrimage would typically have practical and theoretical elements, it just happened that the current papers had rather clear-cut distinctions. This does not mean, of course, that the papers fail to cover the complexity of pilgrimage, as the current selection traverses over several geographical areas, pilgrimage phenomena and concepts. The editors did not shy away from the notion of the ‘unity of contrasts’, where we allowed the academic scope to widen, for instance, to include articles on non-academic professions which use pilgrimage as a tool.peer-reviewe