Essay: Trashing Mount Sinai

Elvis Presley's Graceland in Memphis has become a shrine, a sort of tackiness made sacred. Mount Sinai, where God came to earth, is about to become a sacred place made tacky.

A billboard on a road six miles north of Sinai's Monastery of St. Catherine says, "At this site will be 500 villas, a tourist village with 250 rooms, two hotels with 400 rooms, shopping center, school and hospital, supplied by all facilities." The "great and terrible wilderness" described by Deuteronomy is on its way to becoming a tourist trap.

The pilgrim will no longer have to make the 2 1/2-hour...

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