Sin and Salvation A Guided Walking Tour

For nearly three centuries, New Orleans has lived somewhere between the sacred and the scandalous. Sin & Salvation explores the complicated relationship between faith, vice, morality, power, forgiveness, and reinvention in a city that has never fit neatly into anyone’s definition of respectable. Beginning at Jackson Square, guests look toward St. Louis Cathedral while hearing of notorious Gallatin Street and Bricktop, then enter the religious heart of the city through Père Antoine, the Ursulines, Marie Laveau, Henriette Delille, and the Sisters of the Holy Family. Mardi Gras, Lent, temperance, Storyville, jazz, sex-work, and the lives of Josie Arlington, Lulu White, and Norma Wallace reveal a city where sin and salvation have always existed side by side. We begin looking at a cathedral while talking about sin. We end seated in a former bordello talking about salvation, asking: Who gets to define sin, what does salvation look like, and who gets to be saved?