1st Edition

Pilgrimage to the National Parks Religion and Nature in the United States

By Lynn Ross-Bryant Copyright 2013
326 Pages 32 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

344 Pages 32 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

326 Pages 32 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

National Parks – ‘America’s Best Idea’ – were from the first seen as sacred sites embodying the God-given specialness of American people and American land, and from the first they were also marked as tourist attractions. The inherent tensions between these two realities ensured the parks would be stages where the country’s conflicting values would be performed and contested. As pilgrimage... Read more

Introduction: Our National Parks  Part I: The New World  1. Yosemite: New World Sublimity  2. The Dream of Yellowstone: Progress in the Pristine Land  Part II: See America First  3. Seeing America in Grand Canyon and Glacier National Parks  4. The National Park Idea  Part III: Wilderness and Beyond  5. Mythic and Scientific America  6. The Wilderness Idea  7. Unbounded Possibilities  Epilogue: Pilgrimage and the Future of the National Parks  Bibliography  Index

Biography

Lynn Ross-Bryant is Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of Religious Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder. Recent work has been on American nature writers, including "The Land in American Religious Experience" and on the national parks including "Sacred Sites: Nature and Nation in the National Parks" and "Ken Burns and American Mythology in The National Parks: America’s Best Idea."

"If nature, nation, and God have been three of the most crucial orienting ideas of American history, Lynn Ross-Bryant shows here how this trinity has come together at one of the nation’s distinct forms of sacred space: the national parks. This is a lucid and penetrating analysis of what these places have meant, both for those who have made pigrimages to them over the last century and a half, and for many of those who stayed behind." -- Adrian Ivakhiv, University of Vermont