Balaban (Emory University, U.S.A.) analyses different kinds of narratives told by pilgrims about their experience of having Marian apparitions. His interest concerns the question of how pilgrims construe their narratives in order to negotiate the conflict of their specific religious experience with the beliefs and assumptions of the broader secular culture in which they live. It appears that through the strategic use of particular metaphors for knowledge, pilgrims reduce their role as agents in the apparition event as a way to refer to the divine authority involved in this phenomenon. (Kurt Feyaerts and Lieven Boeve)