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Ted Olsen's April cover story, "He Talked to Us on the Road," reminded me of a pilgrimage of sorts from a few years ago. In planning a New England vacation, I included a trip to Williams College in western Massachusetts in search of the Haystack Prayer Meeting monument. While visiting this now-obscure memorial overshadowed by ancient pines, I felt somehow connected to the four young men who were inflamed with a passion for foreign missions, particularly to Southeast Asia and India, and launched a worldwide movement thereafter.

My brief time at that quiet monument wasn't necessarily a holy moment, but it connected me to a powerful work of God in history, a work that spanned the globe and touched my life. It was a pilgrimage I'll never forget.

Kevin Wheeler
Bossier City, Louisiana

I was delighted to see Ted Olsen's story on Christian pilgrimage. As a professor at John Brown University, I take students and staff on such adventures quite often, always with the purpose of using the trips as tools for spiritual formation.

I was surprised, though, that Olsen did not mention some of the most fascinating pilgrims of Christian history, the Celtic peregrini of the early Irish monastic era.Their determination to "seek the place of their resurrection" is a worthy model: that as we leave behind what's familiar, something new and living can perhaps emerge.

Tracy Balzer
Siloam Springs, Arkansas

As a retired minister living on a subsistence income, I have never been to the Holy Land, Taizé, Mount Sinai, Geneva, Rome, or Luther's Germany; even a "pilgrimage" to my alma mater, Wheaton College, is out of sight. Yet I agree with your insight that all Christians need pilgrimages in order to experience ecstasy (ekstasis, literally, "to stand outside oneself"). We need to climb the mountain not only to reach the peak, but also to look back at our daily world, small and comfortable, and see its place in the panorama of God's world.

The Bible says that God rested on the seventh day of creation, and that keeping the Sabbath reflects being made in his image. Of course, the Almighty doesn't need rest like we do, but there is a necessary truth in that term. Rest or re-creation speaks two truths: first, that we are not subservient to the universe of matter—we extend beyond it; and second, despite that, matter, places, and things are real. Created by God, they are good and deserve our attention and care.

Coalman Coates
Nashville, Tennessee

As editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization (ecc), I found C. L. Lopez's HeadLines piece "Book Brouhaha" [April, p. 15] skewed and incomplete. It ignores significant elements of the dispute and quotes uncritically and sometimes approvingly the assertions of ecc's critics. ecc has 1,400 entries in four volumes with 1.8 million words. The offending passages total only 248 words. By no standard of proportionality is it fair to condemn a work of 1.8 million words on the basis of 248 words.

Lopez cited in full one of the offending passages on Islamic conquests of the Middle East and Central Asia from the 7th to the 15th centuries. It mentions the original Christian homelands in North Africa being "stolen" by the Arabs, and the vast Asian hinterland from Asia Minor to China being overrun by the Turks and Mongols as locusts. I challenge any historian, Christian or Muslim, to disprove the historical accuracy of these statements. Before they do so, they should read Philip Jenkins's The Lost History of Christianity for a starter. I could give them hundreds of other narratives.

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June 2009, Vol. 53, No. 6