Interior with Young Man Reading (1898) by Vilhelm Hammershøi:
(featured on the cover of The Edge of Words by Rowan Williams)
What our 4th of July celebration looked like (yes, that’s me jumping the firework)
Finished reading: Untamed Hospitality (The Christian Practice of Everyday Life) by Elizabeth Newman đź“š
A rich and thought-provoking account of Christian hospitality. Newman excels at unearthing the political and economic assumptions that shape how we interact with—and construct!—the world around us. One of the great strengths of Untamed Hospitality—and also a lingering weakness throughout—is Newman’s broad understanding of hospitality. She describes hospitality as both “practice” (a complex and corporate activity done across time that aims for certain goods) and “theory” (a way of being in space and time). At its widest descriptive point, Newman says that hospitality “names our participation in the life of God” (13). This capacious understanding means that diverse phenomena all fall within the purview of hospitality—worship, in particular, takes a leading role. The positive side of this is that hospitality is given rather thick conceptual and theological description. The drawback is that the book operates at a level of abstraction that is somewhat surprising given the subject matter.
That our bodies are so deeply configured in ways antithetical to the body of Christ could be a cause for despair. But Christian resistance entails not despair but repentance, a repentance we enact within the wider eucharistic context of Christ’s presence as we kneel or bow our heads and confess our sins. We repent rather than despair because we learn to embody the truth that God has not abandoned us but remains present, a material presence celebrated and welcomed as we gather around the Lord’s Table.
We never abandon ritual and myth, even in our seemingly quotidian lives.
All education is ultimately formation in love of something. As Augustine states, “Whether for good or for evil, each man lives by his love.” Therefore, we need to ask, what kind of love does our politics produce? Is it the Kantian “good” of autonomously achieving freedom and rationality? Is is the utilitarian “good” that makes desire of satisfaction central? Is it the “good” of relativism (we each choose our own good) that can quickly degenerate into indifference? In the words of Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, “The true antithesis of love is not hate but despairing indifference, the feeling that nothing is important.”
As frequently noted, a liberal polity that focuses only on individual rights (and the nation-state as the guarantor of those rights) creates over time a society of self-interested individuals and, eventually, a society of strangers. So understood, individuals enter society through social contract, to protect person and property. Since such a polity trains us to see others as strangers and potential threats, the apparent harmony of liberal pluralist rhetoric actually conceals conflict and fragmentation…. Since we have no common good, we easily become a society of strangers bound only by our mutual fears and need for protection from potential threat.
Liberal politics embraces the idea that there is not one end but many. But such pluralism in reality serves the good of the market and the nation-state. The politics that forms the lives of Christians ought ultimately to serve the body of Christ rather than any secular nation. Such politics has to do with ordering the lives of persons who are members of one another, rather than arranging the lives of individuals.