Bibles and Baedekers

It has become increasingly common to read tourism and travel in the modern world as a form of religion, a new opiate of the masses. Yet what happens if we consider Church and theology as religious forms of tourism and travel? Likewise discussions of location, identity and the self have increasingly made use of religious texts, ideas and metaphors. Yet theology is wary of using secular texts, ideas and metaphors. This book addresses this oversight. It specifically seeks to re-read the modern issues of movement, location, identity and God from the insights of texts on tourism, travel and exile. What is the theology of tourism, travel and exile in a modern and postmodern world?Both tourist and traveller represent modernist theological positions, sure of what they can and will experience, sure of the sense of gaining a new identity out of movement. The postmodern Christian embodies the fulfilment of Bonhoeffer's 'religionless Christianity'; dislocated from both a secular and 'religious' world. Like an exile they exist incompletely in neither location, acting as a liminal point of mutual encounter and critique. Wandering in the world and through both 'religious' and secular texts, 'religionless Chrisitianity' becomes the expression of the theological flaneur, a response to the presence yet absence of the Emmaus Christ.