“Only thoughts reached while walking have value,” wrote Nietzsche. Religions seem to have a similar view. Pilgrimage has been a wide-spread aspect of most religions, through most historical periods. This course will examine the relation of travel (in its many guises) to religion, from pilgrimage to common tourism. The overarching theory for the course will be my own manuscript, Bewilderment: Travel and the Quest for Religious Confusion. Jonathan Sumption’s classic Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion and Simon Coleman and John Elsner’s well-illustrated Pilgrimage: Past and Present in the World’s Religions will provide the historical role of pilgrimage in Christian, Moslem, and Hindu traditions. The majority of the course, however, will focus on the present day and on contexts that are not explicitly religious by reading travel accounts by Mark Twain, Henry Miller, and Alphonso Lingis. The point of the course, then, is to examine why travel is so important religiously and how all travel, even tourism, is religiously significant. Undergraduates who have completed less than 51 credits must have the permission of the assistant dean for BALS to register.