The hugely popular author of children's literature Jaroslav Foglar wrote stories about boys on the threshold of adolescence undergoing a personality transformation under the influence of a positive example of friendship and an active lifestyle. However, the themes of honesty, of health and physical activity, and of living in natural surroundings cannot alone justify why this fiction is also viewed from the perspective of the science of religion using terms such as "cult", "mystery", "evangelistic text", "initiation", "functional equivalent of religion", or "implicit religion". Empirical research within the framework of a larger questionnaire survey therefore addresses the question of whether the readers of these books are recruited from backgrounds that are religious, spiritual, or indifferent, whether they are aware of this literature for children having a certain spiritual component, and whether they perceive it as a way of realizing spiritual experience. The group of respondents in the research (n = 1135, of whom 666 were men and 464 women) were most often in the 30-55-year-old age group, with a university degree, living in a larger city with more than 100,000 inhabitants, and with diverse relationships to religious faith and spirituality. According to the results, we found that this literature offered some form of spiritual inspiration to 48% of the respondents, that 30% of the respondents perceived this spiritual component intensely, and that 29% believed that they had applied some of the spiritual values associated with the books in their daily lives. The theoretical interest of religious studies in this literature for boys is thus empirically justified.
The aim of this study is to present the main approaches of research into the connections between religion and tourism. The first part focuses on the concept of religious tourism. This term is used primarily to accommodate the needs of the tourism industry in order to distinguish among various types of religious travel. Religious tourism is either defined as a form of pilgrimage without religious motives and practices or as an all-encompassing category for all types of travel exhibiting religious features including both pilgrimage with and without religious motives and practices. The rest of the paper discusses the role of pilgrimage in the analysis of the relationship between religion and tourism. Pilgrimage is viewed by many scholars as a sacred journey and this view deeply affects the interpretation of tourism and its relation to religion. Tourism is distinguished from the pilgrimage according to several dichotomies (sacred/profane, religious/secular, ascetic/hedonistic). Some of these dichotomies are used to demonstrate tourism as a certain type of new religion. However, these approaches are misleading and based on false assumptions. This article argues that studies inspired by performative, mobile and spatial turns provide a more nuanced, unbiased, complex, and accurate picture.