Roadside Religion
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 07.18.05 | 12:54 AM ET
Travel and spirituality have long been intertwined, but rarely with the “spectacular absurdity” witnessed by Timothy K. Beal. In 2002, he set out with his wife and two children to explore America’s religious roadside attractions, public spectacles like the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, Florida, and a rebuilt Noah’s Ark in Frostburg, Maryland.
He has written about their journey in a new book, “Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange and the Substance of Faith,” and in a terrific essay in Sunday’s New York Times. “Faith is important to me,” he writes in the Times. “I am a professor of religion. My wife, Clover Reuter Beal, is a minister. But what was I to make of the kind of religious expression that assaults travelers on a public road with an 11-acre collage mixing rusty washing machines and tilting crosses with sentiments like ‘Rich man in hell repent’ and ‘You will die’?”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
