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 📚

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.

Elizabeth Newman:

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.

Elizabeth Newman:

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.”

Elizabeth Newman:

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.

Elizabeth Newman:

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.

Elizabeth Newman:

If we had to choose between a politically imposed good and a politics in which individuals had the freedom to choose their good, wouldn’t the freedom to choose be much better, risky though it is? Isn’t the imposition of a good inherently violent? Yet this way of putting the matter misses the point. If politics has to do with the way we organize and arrange our lives in service to the good, the prior question is, what good are we already serving? We do not start in midair, so to speak; we are always already a part of some story or tradition that we did not explicitly choose. The great illusion of liberal democracy is that freedom to choose is absolute (as long as we don’t hurt anyone). Yet in our “culture of choice,” such politics is sustained by and underwrites a market economics approach to education, work, family, and so on—a fact we do not explicitly choose. As Stanley Hauerwas notes, such a polity in colleges and universities further inscribes students “into capitalist practices in which they are taught to think that choosing between ‘ideas’ is like choosing between a Sony and a Panasonic. It never occurs to them that the very idea they should ‘choose’ is imposed.” Now we can see clearly that pluralism is simply an illusion. The prior question to ask of any educational or political endeavor is, which good is it serving?

Elizabeth Newman:

Far from being apolitical, the practice of hospitality is always sustained by some political assumptions. A hospitality equated with openness, tolerance, and pluralism is entrenched in a particular kind of politics: the polity of our liberal democratic nation-state. By practicing such hospitality, Christians embrace the politics of liberalism, all the while failing to notice that it is a politics. Liberal democratic politics relegates hospitality, along with “faith” and “religion” more broadly, to an apolitical sphere. Stated differently, our liberal democratic polity has led many Christians to fail to see the church itself as a political body. When we fail to see this, we are easily seduced into serving the nation-state rather than the church.