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This chapter shows how — by skipping over issues like hospitality and adopting scientific discourse — systems methodologies turn themselves away from everyday human dealings with technology, and find a (shaky) refuge in general and abstract dispositions and norms. It is argued that the notion of hospitality introduces a universe of discourse closer to human existence and its basic institutions, able to grant an existential indexing to systems development activities while avoiding human factors. Thinking, acting, and behaving in terms of hospitality allow something more constructive: the re-registering of our networks of dues and commitments to a strange actant (the technology) around a strange attractor.

This chapter examines the Household of God and smaller households by looking more specifically at how members of those households ought to live in this “in‐between” time. This chapter considers, first, virtue and practice as part of how the Household of God forms constituent households and then looks at specific practices of the Household and households. Some practices considered include Eucharist, baptism, and hospitality; baptism and confirmation in relation to dating, novitiates, marriage, and procreation; being dependent on other members of the household; and related questions about gender differences, bodily differences (as in disability), and ecumenical conversation.

In the book of Deuteronomy there is a close relationship between memory and food. To examine this relationship use is made of the anthropological work by David Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts. The book of Deuteronomy is rhetorically poised between the wilderness and the Promised Land, and at this liminal point Deuteronomy uses food as a vehicle for articulating Israel's memory of Exodus, wilderness and Conquest. In doing so it makes a number of radical developments from the book of Exodus in its description of the Canaanite cult and in defining Israelite religion focused around pilgrimage feasts to the chosen cultic centre. It also defines the identity of the chosen people through narratives of hospitality or inhospitality that underline the Deuteronomic requirement to offer food to the poor and vulnerable.

This chapter argues that ecumenism is facing a critical moment and that it is important to seek out ways in which to appropriately move forward. It discusses the concepts of Eucharistic sharing, Eucharistic hospitality, Eucharistic receptivity, the authority of experience, and the two-way process of learning.

This essay discusses the challenges for administrative leadership at church-related and other Christian colleges which desire to facilitate dialogue about faith and scholarship. Intellectual hospitality and inclusive conversation are defined and then applied to practical issues such as promotion and tenure. The goal is “to nurture campus cultures that acknowledge, affirm, and celebrate the many varieties of Christian scholarly vocation. ”

This afterword summarizes the book's main findings about the social transformations that the Middle West has experienced since the 1950s. It explains how the decade after World War II presented a multitude of problems for nearly everyone. Roads, electricity, telephone service, and machinery had all been put on hold by the Great Depression and the war. Marginal farmers were unable to make the transition. They did not have the capital to purchase additional land, to mechanize, or to invest in livestock. Ultimately, their failure nevertheless served the region and the nation. Farming became better capitalized and more efficient as a result. The heartland was redefining itself, and the author believes that the Middle West's emphasis on friendliness, hospitality, and native ingenuity owes much to the reinvention of its heritage that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s.

This chapter deals with refugee flows into India since independence, 1947. It discusses contradictions in state policy toward refugees and asylum policy. In this context it discusses various court decisions and the developing asylum jurisprudence in the country. The chapter argues that the relation between care and power is not a simple causal one, namely, that by caring one amasses power. The relation is complex. The arrangement of care does not simply flow from the sovereign legal authority at the top. The world of care is as multiple, heterogeneous, and segmented as the world of power. The heterogeneity of power builds up and draws on the heterogeneity of the act of caring. The more multiple this universe, the more complex the game.

Since J. M. Coetzee's writing often concerns itself with both classic texts and the problematics of translation, the question as to his view of the relation between translation and the classic arises. This chapter argues that this relation, for Coetzee, entails a view of translation as both homage to and critique of the classic text. The argument commences with a consideration of the essay ‘What Is a Classic?’. After defining the classic relationally rather than essentially, Coetzee concludes by positing criticism of the classic as a prerequisite of its survival. Thus, the relation of translation — itself a form of criticism (Benjamin) — to the classic is marked by what Derrida terms ‘hostpitality’: hostility-as-hospitality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Coetzee's practice as translator (of a sonnet sequence by Achterberg) that points to the intricate identification of self-aware critique and homage in the relation between translation and the classic.

The Buddha returns to visit his hometown, and this affords the poet the opportunity to renew his description of Newar culture. Chittadhar's narration is mostly unsentimental and true to the tradition's accounts: he goes there to propagate his teachings, begging as elsewhere to gain his daily sustenance. His meetings offer some imaginative and emotional opportunities. Yashodharā meets with the Buddha not as husband with wife, but as a host and guest in a broader context of hospitality. Although Yashodharā sheds tears of bittersweet reunion, she later accepts the Buddha as a religious teacher belonging to humanity. Siddhārtha struggles to gain King Shuddhodana's approval. When he ordains and takes away Rāhula, the poet explains the origin of a Vinaya rule that a child must have his parents' consent to be ordained. Many other youths join the Buddha, including his cousins Nanda, Ānanda, and a city barber, Upali.

Within Western liberal democracies a variety of answers are given to the question of how, within a polity wherein a plurality of different visions of the good life coexist, some form of common life is to be forged. This chapter outlines three of these answers and situates them within wider philosophical and theological debates about the role of religious reasons in public political deliberation. The first approach assessed is the translation model. The work of John Rawls is assessed as a paradigmatic example of such an approach. An alternative to the translation model is the conversation model. The emphasis in this model is on the attempt to take seriously the actual beliefs and practices of particular traditions as the basis for common deliberation. The work of Jeffrey Stout and Alasdair MacIntyre are discussed as examples of this approach. It is argued that they attempt to develop an account of how diverse and incommensurable moral traditions can deliberate about common action without having to find some agnostic or neutral language into which all ‘thick’ language must be translated. The third approach outlined is the hospitality model. While there is much overlap with the conversation model, the hospitality model represents a specifically Christian theological approach to determining common action between diverse traditions. Like the conversation model, the hospitality model seeks to give an account of how different traditions can engage directly with each other. But its emphasis is on common public action, rather than conversation or dialogue. The article ends with a comparative analysis of all three models.

The story of the Levite and his (possibly) adulterous wife in Judges 19 (like Lot's exposure of his daughters to the men of Sodom in Genesis 19) is often seen as a horrific example of how women are treated as chattels in the Bible: not only does the Levite thrust her into the hands of townsmen who rape her to the point of death, he then butchers her into a dozen pieces as an object lesson and rallying point for the 12 tribes of Israel. The history of interpretation of Judges 19 followed two lines: since the Septuagint text said nothing about the woman's unfaithfulness, patristic writers (who relied on the LXX) were generally sympathetic to her, but later medieval Christians read the Hebrew Bible's report of her harlotry and saw some justice in her unhappy fate. What unites both stories (Judges 19 and Genesis 19), however, is that even when the woman was seen as providentially punished, no one excused her husband or her assailants, even as Lot was roundly censured for his callousness – despite considerations of the duties of hospitality and the appeals to compensatory evil or temporary insanity that were usually factored into the moral equation.

This chapter explores the paradigm of “sharing the world” with a focus on modern models of giving, divestment, and hospitality. Those who live in the modern West are often faced with an overwhelming variety of charitable and philanthropic options and opportunities to engage in relief and religious responses to poverty and need. Without advising any one particular path of response, the chapter here explores the challenges that face those who desire to make lifestyle decisions that are appropriate to one's personal situations. Drawing from personal narrative, Catholic social thought on “the common good,” the modern ideology of human rights, and early Christian canons on how to treat the poor and needy, this chapter offers images for a refreshed view of sharing the world.

This chapter explores the relationship between, food and drink, populations, and individuals. It considers why food and nutrition have until recently figured little in historical discussions. It touches on the expenditure of time and income on food production and preparation over the decades and across social classes, the cultural influences on food consumption, and the connections between food and hospitality. Chapters 2–5 are essentially narrative, examining changing patterns of consumption over time, the contrasts between the consumption patterns of rich and poor and, in particular, the increasing importance of potatoes. Chapters 6–9 discuss the frequency and severity of famines in Ireland and examine the connections between food, nutrition and demographic change. Chapter 10 examines local and national policies on food supplies.

This chapter reveals the extraordinary efforts English planters made to replicate on Barbados the ordered society of their homeland, where deference to superiors and authority were an expectation. Immorality, threatening language, vagabonds, and rebellious servants and slaves all received the attention of government and church leaders. Planters also sought to replicate other important English ways: house design, furnishings, apparel, and diet, along with the tradition of aristocratic hospitality.