This text is a radically different one to that which I first set out to write, itself an example of what is involved in the disruption and dis-location of undertaking flanerie knowledge. The text is also different from the one envisaged when I actually began writing. All texts, of course, take on their own internal dialectic and hermeneutic, and my work has sharply raised the question for me as to what degree this process is constrained by what the author desires to express.

Originally, this text was going to follow a well-worn formula. It was to be an engagement with the biblical material that configures with the ideas under consideration (in this case texts referring to tourism, travel, exile), followed by a history of tourism, travel and exile in Christianity, focusing amongst other things on the desert abbas and ammas, and on pilgrimage. I intended to follow this with a re-reading of tourism, travel, and exile from a postmodern perspective As I said, this was the original intention and yet obviously this has not been what you have read, as my studies forced me into new directions, pushing into areas I had initially attempted to keep peripheral. In fact, initially peripheral thought became central.

One key shift in focus related to the claims of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This was not only a response to his well-known calls for a religionless Christianity in his Letters and Papers from Prison, but also, perhaps even more centrally, a response to his dialectic Christology.