Religion and Tourism

Religion plays an inevitable part in shaping our day to day lives, inspires our values, influences our beliefs, and helps us build a strong foundation of morals and ethics. On the other hand, traveling also plays a pivotal role in lives as every human being on this planet has to travel every day for various purposes. The most appreciated and desired form of traveling is the one which is done for leisure purposes. Traveling gives a person the opportunity to explore every corner of the world. The form of travel that brings both the purity of religion and the peace of traveling is called Religious Tourism. Religious tourism is one of the most prominent and oldest forms of tourism but very little focus is given on this prolific form of tourism. For years, religious tourism has played significant role in establishing the international tourism industry and diminishing the obstacles of traveling beyond borders. The foundation of this book is derived from both our personal and professional passion and enthusiasm in tourism and our own religious backgrounds and religious belief systems, which guide our everyday lives and enlightens everyone. Every year millions of people travel to religiously sacred places not only to perform their religious activities but also to encounter the serenity of those places. This book focuses on the evolution of major religions of the world, Religious places all around the world, Religious practices all around the world and also deals with topics like atheism, agnostic beliefs and different kinds of religious practices such as nature religion and new age religion. In addition to volume, this form of travel is geographically widespread with most regions of the world being home to sacred spaces that appeal to religious adherents or other people who visit sacred spaces out of sheer curiosity. Given this lack of information compared to other forms of tourism and the fact that scholars, religious leaders and pilgrimage destination officials continue to debate the nature of tourism, religion, pilgrimage and religious tourism, the idea for this book developed. Scholars of religion and scholars of tourism are brought together in this volume to examine the social, economic, historical and political elements of the religion and tourism crossover. The book aims to create empirically an overview of various world religions and spiritual movements and their dealings, requirements, practices and traditions in relation to various forms of travel. Unfortunately, space and time constraints necessarily limited the range and scope of faiths that could have been analyzed. The decision to include a specific belief system was based on availability of information and expertise. In this approach, efforts were made to include contributors who are both academic scholars and where possible adherents of the belief systems under examination. In all but a few cases, this was a notable success. Our hope is that this volume will provide first-hand insight into the spiritual and religious elements of tourism and provide a conceptual foundation for increased research into this pervasive but understudied global phenomenon.