Where Jesus went, and Paul, and Martin ...

This seemed like the book Mike Huckabee would be picking up in the next couple of weeks – oh, OK, maybe months – but his grandly paid Presidents Day weekend in Grand Cayman for the price of a 20-minute speech may have affected his tastes. . . . Nah, Huck still will love “The Christian Travel Planner” by Kevin J. Wright (Thomas Nelson, 416 pp., $16.99, paperback), an encyclopedic and friendly presentation and exposition of sites around the world to entice and inspire travelers uninterested in Sodom, Gomorrah, or Vegas. Pilgrimage tours, mission trips, retreats, conference cruises, camp vacations, religious festivals, solo itineraries devised by the reader alone or with friends are all possible with the materials Wright has meticulously assembled. Jesus (Israel, Jordan, the Egyptian Sinai), Saint Paul (Turkey and Greece), early Christianity (Rome and the Vatican), John Knox (Scotland), Martin Luther (Germany), Thomas Becket (Canterbury Cathedral), John Calvin (Switzerland) are all historical pieces of the worldwide reach of Christian religions and their shrines and remnants.

With each selection, including the Creation Museum outside Cincinnati and the Holy Land Experience in Orlando and the Amish community in Pennsylvania, Wright includes almost all the information an interested traveler, armchair or otherwise, might require in order to take the next step. With some, he goes further: Why should I visit? What should I see and do? How much time should I spend? How can I get there? All are answered succinctly (and none too theologically). In the section on cruises, for instance, Wright summarizes trips by length, cost, when best to go, with whom, and adds a list of “Demands and Benefits”: spiritual focus, fellowship opportunities, physically demanding, intellectually stimulating, emotionally rewarding, culturally enriching. The book has other virtues, though not pictorial (it is truly a paperback, black and white): maps showing itineraries, be they Paul’s or Moses’; a detailed index; pages of notes; a varied bibliography; a list of tour operators; and more websites throughout than you can imagine. Then, again, the religious travel industry is a multibillion-dollar business with hundreds of millions of participants each year. Thinking again of the job-hunting former governor of Arkansas traveling with homo sapiens restores my faith in humanity.