Beal's Spiritual Journey

The nature of Beal’s religious quest is to discover religion in modern-day America by traveling with his wife and two children in their “Home-a-Roam” (29-foot long motor home) to visit roadside religious attractions. This trip is essentially geographical in na-ture. In his first trip with his family as he portrays his itinerary on page 19, Beal explains, “Our route formed a figure eight: Ohio to Virginia…to North Carolina to Georgia to Alabama to Tennessee to Kentucky to West Virginia to Virginia…to Maryland to Ohio.” These were the places Beal and his family had visited as he illustrated their experiences, which were his main focus in his book. As a religion scholar and teacher, Beal dares himself to face his own vulnerability and personal convictions about his faith, thus this has been as well an intellectual and academic quest for him.
In page 13 Beal self-reflects during his visit to Cross Garden, “.my initial experience was an irreducible mix of amusement and monumental horror,” and he goes on to explain his experience as he speaks to the Rice couple, “…and got to know their story, my feeling about the place, and then, began to change. I began to feel at home in their world.” He realizes that the Rice couple was not weird and that their expression of their place was a “profound religious experience.” This place, out of all of the one he visited, seemed to have had such an impact on his perception of expression of religious experience and