Hosting the Stranger ─ Between Religions

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.

"Hosting the Stranger is an exciting contribution to a new generation of interreligious dialogue and scholarship---harmonizing an explicit hopefulness for hospitality within and between religions. 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 is an indispensable resource for students of religious studies as well as practitioners engaged in interreligious dialogue." Tamsin Jones, Lecturer on Religion, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Harvard University, USA

"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 dificulty. The ghost of Derrida haunts 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. The volume opens doors to discussions about translation and uprootedness, liturgies and history. It is 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." Fanny Howe, Chair, Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice Georgetown University, USA

Richard Kearney holds the Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College, USA. His most recent publications include The God Who May Be, Strangers, Gods and Monsters and Anatheism: Returning to God after God.
James Taylor is a teaching fellow in the Philosophy Department at Boston College, USA.