Beyond the Path: Reflections on Pilgrimage and Presence inside the Afterword

In an era shaped by consumerism, mediatization, and technological mediation, the sacred has neither vanished nor weakened—it has migrated, adapted, and reconfigured itself within the fabric of late modernity. This volume explores how sacred meaning endures through transformation rather than resistance, tracing its manifestations across diverse practices: from the commodification of religious symbols and sacred tattooing to technologized pilgrimages, literary journeys, and tactile devotions. Central to these analyses is the body, understood not merely as an instrument of devotion but as the primary locus of transcendence. Through gesture, fatigue, and sensation, the sacred becomes embodied, rendering faith tangible and relational. By engaging theoretical insights from Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity and Roberto Cipriani’s religious vitalism, the work situates contemporary pilgrimage within a world of mobility, fluid identities, and mediated experience. Ethnographic perspectives reveal that walking, touching, and digital sharing constitute new liturgies of meaning, where technology and corporeality intertwine to sustain spiritual practice. The sacred emerges as itinerant, networked, and embodied—circulating through digital traces, bodily inscriptions, and material encounters that bridge the human and the transcendent. Ultimately, this book calls for a relational phenomenology of the sacred—one attentive to how faith is lived, shared, and materialized in everyday life. It redefines pilgrimage and religious experience as movements through thresholds: between body and world, material and digital, immanence and transcendence. The sacred endures because it moves—walking alongside humanity in its ongoing search for meaning.