Since 1917, when three Portuguese shepherd children received apparitions of the Virgin Mary, Fátima has been the destination of milions of pilgrims. The events came at a time of great turmoil in the history of mankind, though the message of Fátima is eternal: prayer and penance form the path to salvation. This work tells the Fátima story with a moving account of the lives of the seers.

Religious studies and research have gained a lot of interest and attention from researchers, policy makers, and practitioners over the last few years, but the socio-economic impacts have not been explored. Taking into account the profound economic impact the tourism and hospitality industries can have on regions and cities around the world, further research in this area is critical to analyze the extent of such impact and the ramifications that are associated with it. The Handbook of Research on Socio-Economic Impacts of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the social and economic factors in faith-based journeys. While highlighting topics such as tourist spending, spiritual tourism, and local development, this publication explores religious tourism in the middle age, as well as the methods of modern religious tourism. This book is ideally designed for business managers, cultural preservationists, academicians, business professionals, entrepreneurs, and upper-level students seeking current research on religious tourism and its socio-economic impacts.

Ritual Studies have achieved prominence since the 1980s, when interest in ritual as an object of inquiry was established, bridging over a number of humanities and social science disciplines. Both connected with religious studies and independent of it; overlapping with social and cultural anthropology, but also with history; related to science and health practices and ranging across the life course to education, Ritual Studies has come to encompass studies of change and dynamism in social life. Rituals are determinate in form, but not static. They enunciate distinctive social values within specific contexts that frame them; and they relate to the wider concerns and issues of their practitioners. Due to this broad and wide-ranging scope, it is often difficult to find a single resource on Ritual Studies, and even more so to find one which moves beyond the beginnings of anthropological theorizing to grapple with the present-day contexts of ritual. Bringing together recent ethnographies of ritual practice and ritualization from across the globe, this Handbook provides case study of ritual in the light of Emotion and Cognition, Identity, Religious Power, Performance and Literature, Ecology and Ecological Disaster, Media, and other topics. While each chapter provides a deep ethnography of a specific society, ritual, or ritualized practice, each also engages with current theoretical and substantive approaches to the relevant topic. The scholars collected here provide original synoptic and indicative pieces as guideposts and pathways through the complex, varied and cross-disciplinary, and vast landscape of scholarship that constitutes Ritual Studies today and points to developments in the future.