Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition

by Christine D. Pohl

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 1999

Overview

Although hospitality was central to Christian identity and practice in earlier centuries, our generation knows little about its life-giving character. Making Room revisits the Christian foundations of welcoming strangers and explores the necessity, difficulty, and blessing of hospitality today.

Combining rich biblical and historical research with extensive exposure to contemporary Christian communities—the Catholic Worker, L’Abri, L’Arche, and others—this book shows how understanding the key features of hospitality can better equip us to faithfully carry out the practical call of the gospel.

Contents

Top Highlights

“Important to the entire community of believers, hospitality was also a special mark of fitness for leadership within the household of God (1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:8).” (Page 32)

“Our contemporary situation is surprisingly similar to the early Christian context in which the normative understandings and practices of hospitality were developed. We, like the early church, find ourselves in a fragmented and multicultural society that yearns for relationships, identity, and meaning. Our mobile and self-oriented society is characterized by disturbing levels of loneliness, alienation, and estrangement. In a culture that appears at times to be overtly hostile to life itself, those who reject violence and embrace life bear powerful witness.” (Page 33)

“Practitioners view hospitality as a sacred practice and find God is specially present in guest/host relationships. There is a mutual blessing in hospitality; practitioners consistently comment that they receive more than they give. Almost all insist that the demands of hospitality can only be met by persons sustained by a strong life of prayer and times of solitude.” (Pages 12–13)

“Hospitality meant extending to strangers a quality of kindness usually reserved for friends and family. The focus, however, was on strangers in need, the ‘lowly and abject,’ those who, on first appearance, seemed to have little to offer.” (Page 19)

“The Old Testament legacy of hospitality is instructive for us. First, the household into which a stranger was welcomed was the center of both social and family activity. Second, even in the earliest part of the tradition, care for strangers went beyond the household. It involved community responsibility and provision, and depended on legislation as well as on generous individual responses. There was never an assumption that individual households alone could care for large numbers of needy strangers. Third, strangers were often first encountered in a more public space. Such a setting allowed a preliminary interaction that reduced some of their ‘strangeness’ before they entered a household. It also provided the larger community with an opportunity to encounter the stranger.” (Page 41)

Product Details

• Title: Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition
• Author: Christine D. Pohl
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 1999
• Logos Release Date: 2015
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subjects: Hospitality › Religious aspects--Christianity; Christian life
• ISBNs: 9780802844316, 0802844316
• Resource ID: LLS:MKNGRMCHRSTRDTN
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T01:32:04Z

About Christine D. Pohl

Christine D. Pohl (Ph.D., Emory University) is professor of social ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. Her books include Making Room and Living on the Boundaries.