Bewildered Travel:
The Sacred Quest for Confusion |
| |
| Frederick J. Ruf |
| 224 pages, 5 1/2 x 9 |
| Cloth 978-0-8139-2667-4 • $49.50 |
| Paper 978-0-8139-2674-2 • $16.50 |
| Studies in
Religion and Culture |
| October 2007 |
 |
Why do we travel? Ostensibly an act of leisure, travel finds us
thrusting ourselves into jets flying miles above the earth, only
to endure dislocations of time and space, foods and languages
foreign to our body and mind, and encounters with strangers on
whom we must suddenly depend. Travel is not merely a break from
routine; it is its antithesis, a voluntary trading in of the security
one feels at home for unpredictability and confusion. In Bewildered
Travel Frederick Ruf argues that this confusion, which we
might think of simply as a necessary evil, is in fact the very
thing we are seeking when we leave home.
Ruf relates this quest for confusion to our religious behavior.
Citing William James, who defined the religious as what enables
us to “front life," Ruf contends that the search for
bewilderment allows us to point our craft into the wind and sail
headlong into the storm rather than flee from it. This view challenges
the Eliadean tradition that stresses religious ritual as a shield
against the world’s chaos. Ruf sees our departures from
the familiar as a crucial component in a spiritual life, reminding
us of the central role of pilgrimage in religion.
In addition to his own revealing experiences as a traveler, Ruf
presents the reader with the journeys of a large and diverse assortment
of notable Americans, including Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Mark
Twain, Mary Oliver, and Walt Whitman. These accounts take us from
the Middle East to the Philippines, India to Nicaragua, Mexico
to Morocco—and, in one threatening instance, simply to the
edge of the author’s own neighborhood.
"What gives value to travel is fear," wrote Camus.
This book illustrates the truth of that statement.
Frederick J. Ruf, Associate Professor of
Theology at Georgetown University, is the author of Entangled
Voices: Genre and the Religious Construction of the Self.
