The New York Times bestselling author and renowned religious studies scholar Stephen Prothero asks: What might it mean to reclaim the practice of wandering—its trust in strangers, its rejection of materialism, its intimacy with nature—as a bedrock principle of the world's religions?

In the spirit of Sapiens and other "big think, big picture" books, Traveling Light uncovers a fascinating commonality among Christianity, Buddhism, Daoism, and other religions: their founders were all wanderers who left their hometowns to pursue a new way of life on the road. Prothero, the author of eleven acclaimed books including the equally expansive God Is Not One and Religious Literacy, brings his deep knowledge of world civilizations to this big history of spiritual innovation and religious betrayal amid the rise of empires.

Reaching from the emergence of sedentary agriculture around 8000 BCE, to the lives of Jesus, the Buddha, and Laozi, Traveling Light reveals how:

• the lives of these holy wanderers were both anti-imperial critiques and affirmations of the lifeways and values of our hunter-gatherer ancestors
• over time, later followers betrayed these revolutionary founders by shifting the focus of their stories from lifeways to beliefs, and by replacing their radical witness with rigid, power-driven institutions we now refer to as religions.

This eye-opening perspective on religious evolution will appeal to readers disillusioned with organized religions but eager to deepen their connections with the spiritual entrepreneurs who inspired them, and to big history enthusiasts keen on examining the role spiritual and religious impulses have played from the beginning of human civilization. Along the way, Traveling Light commends to its readers a way of being human that is somehow both ancient and revolutionary.