Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions

About the Book

Hosting the Stranger features ten powerful meditations on the theme of interreligious hospitality by eminent scholars and practitioners from the five different wisdom traditions: Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic. By gathering thinkers from different religious traditions around the same timely topic of what it means to ‘host the stranger,’ this text enacts the hospitality it investigates, facilitating a hopeful and constructive dialogue between the world’s major religions.

Table of Contents:

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: HOSTING THE STRANGER

Chapter 1: Hospitality in Translation: Hosting the Stranger as a Work of Mourning
James Taylor

Chapter 2: Western Hospitality to Eastern Thought
Joseph O'Leary

Chapter 3: Interreligious Hospitality and its Limits
Catherine Cornille

Chapter 4: Departures: Hospitality as Mediation
Kalpana Seshadri

Chapter 5: Misgivings About Misgivings and the Nature of a Home: Some Reflections
on the Role of Jewish Tradition in Derrida's Account of Hospitality
Jacob Meskin

PART TWO: INTERRELIGIOUS HOSPITALITY

I. Jewish Perspectives

Chapter 6: The Open Tent: Angels and Strangers
Edward Kaplan

Chapter 7: Sukkot: Levinas and the Festival of the Cabins
Hugh Cummins

II. Christian Perspectives

Chapter 8: Hospitable by Calling, Inhospitable by Nature
Patrick Hederman

Chapter 9: Biblical, Ethical and Hermeneutical Reflections On Narrative Hospitality
Marianne Moyaert

III. Buddhist Perspectives

Chapter 10: The Awakening of Hospitality
John Makransky

Chapter 11: Buddhism and Hospitality: Expecting the Unexpected and Acting Virtuously
Andy Rotman

IV. Islamic Perspectives

Chapter 12: The Dead and the City: The Limits of Hospitality in the Early Modern
Levant
Dana Sajdi

Chapter 13: Some Reflections on Hospitality in Islam
Joseph Lumbard

V. Hindu Perspectives

Chapter 14: Food, the Guest, and the Taittiriya Upanisad: Hospitality in the Hindu
Traditions
Francis Clooney

Chapter 15: God as Guest: Hospitality in Hindu Culture
Swami Tyagananda

NOTES

CONTRIBUTORS

About the Author :

Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin, the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and the University of Nice. He is the author of over 20 books on European philosophy and literature and has edited or co-edited 14 more. He was formerly a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, the Higher Education Authority of Ireland and chairman of the Irish School of Film at University College Dublin. As a public intellectual in Ireland, he was involved in drafting a number of proposals for a Northern Irish peace agreement (1983, 1993, 1995) and in speechwriting for the Irish President, Mary Robinson. He has presented five series on culture and philosophy for Irish and/or British television and broadcast extensively on the European media. His most recent work in philosophy comprises a trilogy entitled 'Philosophy at the Limit'. The three volumes are On Stories (Routledge, 2002), The God Who May Be (Indiana UP, 2001) and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters (Routledge, 2003).

James Taylor is a teaching fellow in the Philosophy Department at Boston College, USA. His main areas of expertise are Ricoeur, Foucault, Heidegger and Gadamer.

Review :
Hosting the Stranger is an exciting contribution to a new generation of inter-religious dialogue and scholarship - harmonizing an explicit hopefulness for hospitality within and between religions with an insistent respect for differing understandings of what constitutes hospitality. The book presses the urgency of the need for inter-religious hospitality without ignoring the risk entailed in 'welcoming the stranger'. It is a wonderfully balanced collection of essays bringing together theoretical and methodological investigations with a number of concrete discussions of the sources, understandings, and examples of hospitality in five different religious traditions. Accessible, yet historically attuned and theoretically nuanced, this collection of essays on hospitality in religion is an indispensable resource for students of religious studies as well as religious practitioners engaged in inter-religious dialogue. This is an important, open-hearted and useful collection of essays on the subject of hospitality, which often takes language as the first sign of its difficulty. The ghosts of Ricoeur and Derrida haunt the first half of the volume, and then it opens into Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and Hindu perspectives on the subject of welcome in which God is the long-awaited guest. Almost any one of these essays could be read by students in a number of disciplines; the volume opens doors to discussions about translation and uprootedness, liturgies and history. They are written with great clarity and ease by people who know their subject and want to share it. It is, as its title suggests, a cheering book. this volume of high quality and accessible papers probes hospitality as a task toward the stranger, alien, and victim through Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist wisdom traditions (Part 2) under the hermeneutical influence of Levinas and Derrida (Part 1)... [It] will invigorate student learning in university classrooms across an array of theological subdisciplines for all intent on responding constructively to the scandals of alienation, violence, and their religious legitimation.