When we first planned this adventure, it was summer, and I would be on the road in my old car maybe a couple months – long before the snow flew. We ended up starting in New England just as the ice and snow settled over the roads. It has become readily apparent that I could spend days in blizzards and ice storms. Also, I need to work over the holidays and I want to be near my family in the Seattle area, so I’m going to take the blog with me to the Pacific Northwest and explore the possibility of talking to coastal Native Americans about their spirituality.

So the plan now is to take shorter journeys, heading South and to the West Coast during the height of winter and lingering a little longer in interesting places to talk about issues. I plan to visit Alaska, the Midwest and the upper Northeast in the Spring. Also, this will give me more of an opportunity to focus on issues like faith in the public square, poverty, social justice, culture and ritual. I want to look at the borderlands – how Americans’ faiths meld and overlap geographically, how modern and ancient cultures converge, how Eastern and Western religions meet, and how we deal with the personal and the public aspects of faith. Along the way, I will continue to collect average people’s faith stories.

I will explore the “head and heart” of America’s religious beliefs and practices, as Parker calls it: The motifs of more cerebral New England Protestantism and Presbyterianism along with the more emotional traditions of the Baptists, Methodists and American Pentecostal movement. I will still leave plenty of time for wandering. But I also hope to be able to linger a little longer as well.