|
Ivan Illich: Institutionalization of Gift. I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied, it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand. On the other hand, radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community.
Hospitality, that is, the readiness to accept somebody who is not from our hut, [across to] this side of our threshold to this bed in here, seems to be, among the characteristics which anthropologists can identify, one of the most universal, if the not the most universal. But hospitality, wherever it appears, distinguishes between those who are Hellenes and those who are ‘blabberous’, barbarians.
|