Worship Weblog
Monday, June 18, 2007
Alban Weekly on ‘Hospitality to the Stranger’
Hospitality to the Stranger
by Thomas G. Long
In his thoughtful book The Company of Strangers, Quaker educator Parker Palmer launches a critique of what he calls our culture’s “ideology of intimacy”—a nest of attitudes that together posit that the main purpose of human life is the development of autonomous, individual personalities and that this development takes place only within the context of warm, intimate, interior-directed relationships. In Welcoming the Stranger: A Public Theology of Worship and Evangelism, theologian Patrick Keifert builds on Palmer’s critique and calls upon the church in its thinking about worship to replace the theologically insufficient category of “intimacy” with the biblical category of “hospitality to the stranger.” He states, “Hospitality to the stranger implies wisdom, love, and justice—rather than intimacy, warmth, and familiarity—in our dealings with others in public.”
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