Victoria Preston has written the perfect book to draw you into the history and meaning of pilgrimage, dissecting her subject through the prisms of culture, anthropology, religion, faith and civilisation.
Victoria presented the CSJ 2024 Constance Storrs Lecture entitled Coming Full Circle: Pilgrimage and our Planet. The lecture looked at how, over the course of many millennia we have come full circle in appreciating our dependence on Earth’s bounty and express our gratitude through the act of pilgrimage. It also looked at the environmental impacts of pilgrimage itself and considered how we can each play a part to tread more softly along the way.
Each year 200 million of us embark on a pilgrimage of some kind. We have been making ritual journeys for millennia, ever since our ancient ancestors followed migrating animal, coming together to hunt and celebrate. The era of setting out as a matter of survival is long gone, but the impulse to travel somewhere sacred remains.
Victoria Preston discovers that, whether we set forth in search of solace or liberation, as an expression of gratitude or faith, journeys of meaning and purpose are always a powerful reminder that we are each part of something much greater than ourselves.
From the Stone Age pilgrims of Anatolia to the present day crowds at Glastonbury, We Are Pilgrims is a quest to understand what drives this rich and human behaviour, unbounded by time or space, faith or identity.
Victoria Preston has roamed far and wide in her thirty years advising corporate and government clients in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. She is a member of The Quraysh Foundation, an associate fellow at the King’s Centre for Strategic Communications and her work sees her advising companies on communication strategy and narrative. She has an MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics.
ISBN: 9781787383036