ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses European pilgrimage, and suggests the possibility that pilgrimage as a form is particularly useful across this range of contemporary religious phenomena. The plasticity and relative malleability of pilgrimage, the space it often leaves for individual and collective agency, and its ambiguous character as religious' or secular' activity all contribute to making it a uniquely potent way of maintaining or asserting a moral geography that reconfigures the world for personal and collective purposes. Religion enables a spatial sense making that can occur everywhere, from domestic shrines configuring household space to small or large movements that define local, regional, national and international spaces. Clearly, religion is not the only such path, but neither is it easily dismissed as irrelevant to contemporary circumstances. The book examines that pilgrimage broadly defined has a particularly malleable and hence usable role in these reconfigurations.
