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Radical Hospitality: From Thought to Action

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Drawing on key critical debates on the question of hospitality ranging from phenomenology, hermeneutics, Richard Kearney engages with urgent moral conversations regarding the role of identity, nationality, immigration, commemoration, and justice.

Image courtesy of interviewee. May 30, 2024

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The speaker reflects on their upbringing in Ireland during the post-war years, influenced by the traumas of WWII and ongoing conflicts in Northern Ireland. They discuss the interplay between hostility and hospitality, suggesting both concepts share a common linguistic root, highlighting the ethical imperative to transform hostility into hospitality.

Key anecdotes include a 15th-century story of Lord Fitzgerald extending a hand to end a feud, symbolizing the potential for reconciliation. The speaker relates this to their academic work in Paris, particularly with thinkers like Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas, who explored the themes of hospitality and storytelling in the context of post-war Europe.

The concept of "hospitality" is examined across different dimensions: linguistic, narrative, confessional, and carnal. The speaker emphasizes the importance of sharing stories to bridge divides between conflicting communities, using examples from Northern Ireland and interactions among diverse groups.

In their project, the Guest Book, they create dialogues among students from different backgrounds, encouraging them to share experiences and narratives. This video process aims to shift from enmity to a common understanding of hospitality, illustrating the transformative power of storytelling. Ultimately, they argue that stories can both harm and heal, serving as a basis for a hopeful future through mutual recognition and empathy.

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I grew up in Ireland, was born in the early 1950s.

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So very much in the post-war years,

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my father had fought in the, second World War,

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against Hitler in the British Navy,

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was traumatized by that.

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So I grew up, generation, post-war generation

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that was very aware of the wounds of the First World War,

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not only in my own family,

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but also throughout, throughout Europe.

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And at the same time, a decade later,

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there was a war in Northern Ireland,

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the northern part of my country.

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So again, I was aware of conflict, hostility, if you will.

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And at the same time, in the sixties

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and seventies was the anti-war, protests in Vietnam,

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was the anti-Apartheid Civic

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and civil rights marches and so on.

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So I grew up at a time where hostility was very

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dominant as a, an as an experience,

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and the need for hospitality, given the fact

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that both terms, hostility

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and hospitality come from the same root hostas,

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which can mean in Latin, either an enemy or a friend.

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So this was, this was the particular dilemma that led me to,

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philosophize when I later became an academic about the

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problem of hostility and hospitality

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and how they are deeply rooted, at source

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and yet, carry this ethical charge to turn

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and transform hostility into hospitality.

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One particular story

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that influenced me very much growing up in Ireland was that

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of a 15th century incident where,

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there was an intern Nissan, rivalry

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between 2, 2, 2, 2 warring groups in Ireland,

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the Fitzgerald and the Ormans.

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And, at one point, the Ormans were

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surrounded by the Fitzgeralds.

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This was a, 1492.

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So 15th century were surrounded,

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and they took, refuge in Dublin Cathedral

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and the Fitzgeralds, surrounded them, besieged them.

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And then after a while, Lord Fitzgerald,

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Gard Moore Fitzgerald said, let's, let's,

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cut a hole in the door of the cathedral.

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And he took off his arm and he stretched his arm through.

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And he said, if you cut off my bare arm,

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the war will continue.

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Uh, if you shake my hand, the war will end

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and we will turn hostility into hospitality.

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And that's often a, a story I begin with when I'm talking

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to my philosophy students

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and pe students about the, the origins of this,

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really perennial, story of,

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enmity becoming perhaps some form of empathy.

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Well, when I was a student, a doctoral student in Paris,

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I studied with Paul Recur,

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who was writing at the time about,

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Hospitality within, Europe.

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He called it linguistic hospitality in exchange of stories

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and of memories

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between the formerly warring nations of Europe.

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This, again, is post World War, post Hiroshima, post,

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Holocaust, post school lags.

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So it was a very pressing need, as it were to think about

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how we can create a European community

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after so much devastation, and not just in the 20th century,

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but going back through the religious wars and,

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and so on the beginnings of European history, in any case,

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and I might add world history.

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But, so, so this was a topic that was very central

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to the debates in Paris at the time, again,

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in the mid, mid seventies.

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And my other, teachers there, Levina,

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Emmanuel Levina, a Jew who had escaped the Holocaust,

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lost many of his family in the Holocaust, Jacque Deida,

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also a Jewish thinker who very much was, trying to think

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through the question of hospitality.

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Uh, Julia cva, another great teacher of mine

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with whom I did research, who wrote about the origins

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of hospitality and the need to discover,

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that we are strangers to ourselves.

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Uh, in other words, we react very often to strangers coming

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to our nation, coming to our society, coming

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to our community very often with, with hostility.

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But until we recognize that within ourselves,

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there is a stranger that we very often project down

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to others, our shadow, our darkness, our fears,

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our anxieties, until we do that inner work of,

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reckoning with the stranger within us, we can never,

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which in, in a way, is our unconscious,

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our unconscious psyche.

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We can never fully, appreciate how important it is to

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recognize, acknowledge and welcome the Stranger Without.

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But I founded the Guest book Project in 2009,

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with a number of colleagues in, Boston College,

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and also some colleagues in MIT here in Boston.

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And, we, we ran it initially as a, an academic,

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InterVarsity seminar for, faculty members,

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interdisciplinary, very interdisciplinary across, across,

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in fact, 15 different disciplines,

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around the question of, hostility

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and hospitality, starting with this basic fact,

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linguistic fact that most European,

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Indo-European languages share a term that is ambiguous,

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that can mean either, enemy or friend.

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Uh, I mentioned host already in relation to Latin

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that is at the root of hostility and hospitality,

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but also other languages xal in, in Greek,

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which can give rise to xenophobia

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or xeno flia, in other words, hospitality

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or, guest for example, guest guest in, in German,

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hence our word guest in English.

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Uh, but again, the, the, the guest ghast can be ghastly,

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can be the ghost, can be the monster, can be the outsider,

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and so on and so forth.

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When can go through the various, the various languages,

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and you find this, this ambivalent root word,

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and this is carried in turn, not just linguistically,

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but narratively in the different origin stories of,

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most, wisdom traditions, within the west,

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but also within the east

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and further afield indigenous cultures.

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But I concentrated mainly in the guest bank,

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guest book on the, the European, origins of,

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of the term and the stories.

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And of course, there is the Greek story of the,

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the Gods appearing as, as strangers, for example, Zeus

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and Hermes who appear to bachus

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and philemon in the form of strangers.

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And initially, they are rejected, until they

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share food and shake hands.

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And in that gesture, that carnal gesture

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of sharing the hostility turns into, into hospitality,

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and they are revealed as, as divine,

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the former monstrous enemies are revealed as divine.

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You find a similar thing in the Abrahamic stories.

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Um, Abraham,

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and Sarah received the stranger's ur in, in, in, in,

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in Hebrew that appear out of the, out

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of the desert, they share food.

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And the three persons are then revealed as, as divine.

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And St. Paul, of course, in the Christian tradition has a,

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a famous phrase about, always welcome the stranger

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because you may be

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encountering an angel in disguise.

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And, and Jesus Christ, in Matthew 25, when he's asked

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to identify who he is, was,

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and will be, says, five times in Matthew 25,

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I will be a stranger.

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I am the stranger. I was the stranger that asked for food

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and water, and you gave it to me,

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or you did not give it to me, hostility or hospitality.

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So in, in these traditions,

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it carries into Islam very importantly also where food,

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is, is a very important part

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of moving from hostility to hospitality.

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The sharing of food, these origin stories, as I call them,

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these seminal or primal narratives, suggest that

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one of the first, gestures

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of civilization is the handshake, is the sharing of food,

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is the welcoming of the stranger as enemy, who then converts

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into friend ally.

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It's binary as you tell the story simply, it's,

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it's not binary when one looks deeply into it.

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And that was part indeed of our research,

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because, in 99% of cases, of course, we're dealing not

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with hostility, pure hostility,

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or pure hospitality, which in fact, Deida argues

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and levina is impossible.

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It's divine. Humans can't have access to it.

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So very often, the stories

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of pure hospitality are told in sacred stories,

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but they, they serve as a model, as an ideal of the,

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of the imagination as to how we should, could,

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might be if we could move from pure,

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hostility to pure hospitality.

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But for the most part, we're in the middle.

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We're in what Deida calls hospitality,

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which is a nice neologism for the mix

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of hostility and hospitality.

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And therefore, it's always a reckoning.

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It's always a question of discernment.

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You know, Dorothy Day,

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who set up these hospitality houses in Detroit and,

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and Harlem in New York,

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and so on, you know, for the underprivileged and the poor.

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Um, she would say when there was a knock at the door at

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three o'clock in the morning, and she answers it,

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and somebody asked to come in, she said, I,

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how do I know whether it's the Marky Daad

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or, or Jesus Christ?

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And that's always a call as to

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who you let into your hospitality house,

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because if they are murderers and wife, beaters

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and rapists, then they could injure

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and harm those within the home, within the,

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within the sanctuary.

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Um, but at the same time, they may be,

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angels in disguise.

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And for the, for the most part,

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or very often, they may be a mix of both.

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So that's the wager of hospitality. It's not a given.

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Um, you know, like any of these wonderful words, love,

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hospitality, peace, justice, they sound great,

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but they remain sort of just rhetorical terms until, and

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unless one does that, that work of parsing and,

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and negotiating

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and wagering on, on the different possibilities of,

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of hospitality

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and hostility within a particular lived human situation,

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which is very complex and layered.

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Again, this is a way of analyzing what hospitality means

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and how it works,

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because the title of the book, radical Hospitality,

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sorry, the subtitle is from Thought to Action.

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And so it's not just a question of analyzing

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the linguistic origins of the terms for hospitality

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or indeed the philosophies of hospitality going from Homer

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and the Greeks through the Latins up into, you know,

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contemporary, continental or analytic philosophy.

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Um, that's all very helpful

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and very important from the point

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of view of academic scholarship.

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But one also has to look at real situations.

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So in, in reality, hospitality works, I argue,

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we argue in the book, in forming ways,

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linguistic hospitality, narrative hospitality,

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confessional hospitality, and carnal hospitality,

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and a wick word on each.

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Um, linguistic comes from the fact that, in translation,

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there is a host language and there is a guest language.

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And we're translating all the time, not just between people

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who speak different languages,

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that's the most obvious sense of translation.

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But every time we meet a person,

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we are actually be they foreign

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or be they familiar, we are actually translating,

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there's always a host language,

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my language, and the other's language.

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So translation is the attempt to reach sort

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of a delicate balance between a fidelity

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to one's own resources of meaning.

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Uh, otherwise there's no host to receive a guest,

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language, speaker.

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Uh, and on the other hand, one must be aware of the fact

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that the other's language, the other's set of meanings

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and values, is such that they may have something

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that challenges me, that's different from me,

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that is basically other than

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what I have been familiar with.

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So there's always that balance between a fidelity

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to one's host language

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that receives the other into one's linguistic sphere,

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one's linguistic world, and then this sensitivity attunement

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and, humility before the strangeness

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and otherness of the others' language.

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And in any great translation, you know, of the Greeks,

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of the, of the, the biblical sep

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or whatever, there, there's always a shock where the,

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the Hebrew language is renewed

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as it's translated into Greek, and the Greek is challenged

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and opened up by the arrival of these Hebrew break meanings.

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So this is true of any translation.

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I mean, I'm, I'm talking about a classic one.

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In any case, that's a word on on, on linguistic,

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hospitality, which as I say,

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is not just a question of translating.

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The great texts are between foreign languages,

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but also what we do in our everyday lives when we meet

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another person and, and listen and talk and communicate.

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Uh, I'll be very brief on the others narrative.

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Hospitality is the sharing, of stories, of memories.

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Uh, one's national memory, for example,

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can be victory in terms of the battle of the boy in her,

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you know, the Battle of Navarre.

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But for the other nation, it may be a, a story of defeat

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and failure in humiliation

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and dispossession and disinheritance.

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So it's very important to exchange stories

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to exchange wounds, particularly post World War.

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This was very important

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for Paul Reker in his famous essay on New Ethos for Europe,

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based on an exchange of narrative memories,

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actual memories of, of, of pain,

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and actual memories of desire, aspiration,

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because there are potential memories too that have never

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yet been realized in history.

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So this exchange of narratives is very important in the

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creation of, hospitality as we move through

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and beyond hostility.

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But we have to acknowledge, first of all, the stories

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of pain suffering, violence, betrayal

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that separate communities.

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Um, in Northern Ireland, for example,

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this was very important in bringing Protestants

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and Catholics, nationalists

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and unionists together to exchange their stories,

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which were very, very different.

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Um, and then to create a third story.

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So that's narrative, hospitality.

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Uh, then confessional hospitality simply is, is is

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between different religions, because religious violence

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or a lot of violence,

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political violence is based on religious violence,

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even if it's secularized, we need to get back

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to those roots, see what's happening, see

14:58.525 --> 15:02.565
how religions have been carriers of huge, scapegoating,

15:03.025 --> 15:05.125
demonization division.

15:05.395 --> 15:08.325
Look at the Holy Wars, the Poms, the camp, the, the, the,

15:08.425 --> 15:09.565
the, the Crusades.

15:09.825 --> 15:12.845
But at the same time, also, religions can be

15:12.865 --> 15:15.885
and have been carriers of peace and hospitality and justice.

15:16.345 --> 15:17.525
So that's the confessional.

15:17.545 --> 15:21.405
And in fact, one of our guest book books was called,

15:21.755 --> 15:23.485
between Religions,

15:23.485 --> 15:25.525
hosting The Stranger Between Religions.

15:25.525 --> 15:28.405
We went into the five major Wisdom traditions,

15:28.405 --> 15:30.125
including Buddhism, Hinduism.

15:31.185 --> 15:32.845
And then finally,

15:32.945 --> 15:36.125
carnal Hospitality is simply the handshake, is the fact

15:36.195 --> 15:39.645
that it's not just a question of words, linguistic,

15:39.965 --> 15:42.485
hospitality, or stories, or indeed religions.

15:42.485 --> 15:47.045
It's also a question of hand to hand, hospitality.

15:47.305 --> 15:50.285
And that's very often expressed in the handshake,

15:50.315 --> 15:53.165
most emblematically, but also in the sharing of food.

15:53.785 --> 15:57.245
Um, and we look at various, you know, great stories,

15:57.555 --> 16:01.645
baed Feast, Victor, Hugo,

16:01.645 --> 16:04.485
and others, where this question of the sharing of food

16:04.945 --> 16:07.485
and the handshake is absolutely fundamental in turning

16:07.485 --> 16:10.285
people from a situation of hostility and enmity

16:10.285 --> 16:13.245
and violence into, into, peace and hospitality.

16:13.625 --> 16:18.445
In our classes here in Boston, we create an atmosphere

16:18.445 --> 16:20.165
where, where, and an opportunity

16:20.575 --> 16:24.005
where students from different religions, different,

16:24.615 --> 16:29.085
races, different backgrounds, come together,

16:29.995 --> 16:34.285
tell their respective story stories to each other,

16:34.575 --> 16:37.405
share those stories, exchange those stories,

16:37.425 --> 16:39.325
and then as we put it, exchanging

16:39.325 --> 16:40.725
stories, changing histories.

16:41.065 --> 16:45.365
And then the challenge is how, how do historical ities,

16:45.985 --> 16:47.925
translate into stories?

16:48.345 --> 16:50.445
And then in the exchange of stories, how can

16:50.445 --> 16:55.005
that in turn have an impact, on history, on action?

16:55.935 --> 16:58.355
And the, the subtitle, as I mentioned earlier,

16:58.375 --> 17:01.995
of Radical Hospitality, the book is from Thought to Action.

17:02.535 --> 17:05.795
So they actually engage in the exchange of stories.

17:06.535 --> 17:11.195
And that exchange of stories then is, videotaped.

17:11.775 --> 17:15.515
And we post those stories, on our website,

17:15.515 --> 17:17.835
the guestbook website, guestbook project.com,

17:18.455 --> 17:21.395
and other, students.

17:21.855 --> 17:23.995
We mainly deal with young people, not always,

17:24.055 --> 17:28.675
but mainly, in other universities, colleges, schools,

17:28.745 --> 17:30.195
including secondary schools.

17:30.215 --> 17:31.355
In Ireland, Northern Ireland,

17:31.375 --> 17:33.035
we work mainly in secondary schools,

17:33.635 --> 17:34.635
bringing together Protestants

17:34.635 --> 17:36.555
and Catholics, unionists and nationalists.

17:36.695 --> 17:38.235
In one instance, the video

17:39.045 --> 17:43.235
while which they made together was, are featured,

17:43.695 --> 17:46.795
two girls from different schools in, in Derry, London,

17:47.075 --> 17:50.245
der two, two different names for the, for the city divided

17:50.745 --> 17:53.845
of course, between the city itself, the diamond,

17:53.905 --> 17:55.685
and then the bog side,

17:55.685 --> 17:58.525
where the Nationalist Catholics, Republicans resided.

17:58.785 --> 18:01.845
Anyway, they tell their respective stories as to how

18:01.985 --> 18:06.525
for the Protestant unionist loyalist, young woman,

18:06.545 --> 18:09.325
in, in, in high school, technically school, you know,

18:09.785 --> 18:12.485
the walls of dairy protect that community,

18:12.485 --> 18:15.925
that British unionist community from Backwardness

18:16.025 --> 18:20.125
and from, from violence, from invasion, preserves,

18:20.125 --> 18:22.245
civic rights and so on, and the Bill of Rights.

18:22.305 --> 18:25.405
And, and then the Catholic Guard tells how for her, this,

18:25.585 --> 18:28.685
the wall represented dispossession and exclusion and, and,

18:28.685 --> 18:30.045
and, and other kind of violence.

18:30.305 --> 18:31.725
And then they exchange uniforms

18:31.905 --> 18:33.485
and go into their respective schools

18:33.625 --> 18:36.125
and their respective forbidden territory, so to speak.

18:36.625 --> 18:38.485
And they create a sense of humor as they do.

18:38.485 --> 18:41.925
So they literally go in, drag into each other's communities,

18:42.425 --> 18:44.365
and then they make a video about it.

18:44.705 --> 18:47.045
And the, they actually became, you know, peace amba,

18:47.045 --> 18:49.365
young peace ambassadors going into different schools on both

18:49.365 --> 18:52.485
sides of the border, showing their guest book, movie,

18:52.545 --> 18:54.125
and then discussing it with other students.

18:54.425 --> 18:56.645
And of course, this extends further.

18:56.935 --> 18:59.165
There was an exchange between, Israeli

18:59.685 --> 19:01.965
Palestinian students with the Northern Irish students, then

19:01.965 --> 19:04.445
with the Croatian students, Croatian and Serbian students.

19:05.025 --> 19:09.325
And it sets up a sort of an international, laboratory,

19:09.705 --> 19:12.645
without walls where people can

19:13.485 --> 19:15.725
exchange stories in the hopes of changing history.

19:15.785 --> 19:17.445
By creating a new story together.

19:17.955 --> 19:19.725
They acknowledge the story of enmity,

19:19.865 --> 19:23.925
and then project, create, invent a story of hospitality.

19:24.585 --> 19:27.125
Uh, so that becomes a sort of a digital

19:27.675 --> 19:29.485
classroom without walls, so to speak.

19:29.555 --> 19:30.765
Once they post their videos

19:31.025 --> 19:34.565
and exchange those videos with others, I would hope

19:34.635 --> 19:38.805
that they take a sense of just how deeply,

19:40.225 --> 19:43.165
stories can wound

19:43.985 --> 19:46.765
and how miraculously they can heal.

19:47.585 --> 19:51.845
So radical hospitalities recognizing Radis, the root,

19:52.625 --> 19:56.525
of hostility in the human being.

19:56.535 --> 19:59.165
Going back to Cane and Abel, going back to Prometheus

19:59.165 --> 20:02.725
and Prometheus, all the origin stories carry this sense

20:02.725 --> 20:06.645
of hostility, memetic rivalry, competition, violence,

20:07.385 --> 20:11.405
but then also how, that history of violence

20:11.465 --> 20:15.205
and hostility can be converted into stories, narratives,

20:15.785 --> 20:16.925
of hospitality.

20:17.545 --> 20:21.005
And so that that mix of hostility, hospitality, which

20:21.905 --> 20:26.405
we can call hospitality, creates in the reader a sense

20:26.405 --> 20:30.325
of hope, that looking out there at, at how stories

20:30.785 --> 20:31.805
as propagandistic,

20:31.825 --> 20:35.125
as prejudicial can wound harm, carry malice.

20:35.785 --> 20:39.805
Um, betrayal enmity can also be used

20:40.445 --> 20:44.285
reused and transformed into, new stories

20:44.505 --> 20:45.805
of hospitality.

20:46.155 --> 20:48.485
It's like the old adage, you know, the hair of the dog

20:48.485 --> 20:50.725
that bit you, and you will find the cure,

20:50.725 --> 20:53.325
therefore, you find the disease and stories can kill,

20:53.545 --> 20:55.005
but stories can also cure.

20:55.025 --> 20:57.325
That's what I would hope the reader will take from this.

00:00 - I grew up in Ireland, was born in the early 1950s. So very much in the post-war years, my father had fought in the, second World War, against Hitler in the British Navy, was traumatized by that. So I grew up, generation, post-war generation

00:18 - that was very aware of the wounds of the First World War, not only in my own family, but also throughout, throughout Europe. And at the same time, a decade later, there was a war in Northern Ireland, the northern part of my country. So again, I was aware of conflict, hostility, if you will. And at the same time, in the sixties and seventies was the anti-war, protests in Vietnam, was the anti-Apartheid Civic

00:48 - and civil rights marches and so on. So I grew up at a time where hostility was very dominant as a, an as an experience, and the need for hospitality, given the fact that both terms, hostility and hospitality come from the same root hostas, which can mean in Latin, either an enemy or a friend. So this was, this was the particular dilemma that led me to, philosophize when I later became an academic about the problem of hostility and hospitality

01:22 - and how they are deeply rooted, at source and yet, carry this ethical charge to turn and transform hostility into hospitality. One particular story that influenced me very much growing up in Ireland was that of a 15th century incident where, there was an intern Nissan, rivalry between 2, 2, 2, 2 warring groups in Ireland, the Fitzgerald and the Ormans. And, at one point, the Ormans were

01:52 - surrounded by the Fitzgeralds. This was a, 1492. So 15th century were surrounded, and they took, refuge in Dublin Cathedral and the Fitzgeralds, surrounded them, besieged them. And then after a while, Lord Fitzgerald, Gard Moore Fitzgerald said, let's, let's, cut a hole in the door of the cathedral. And he took off his arm and he stretched his arm through. And he said, if you cut off my bare arm,

02:22 - the war will continue. if you shake my hand, the war will end and we will turn hostility into hospitality. And that's often a, a story I begin with when I'm talking to my philosophy students and pe students about the, the origins of this, really perennial, story of, enmity becoming perhaps some form of empathy. Well, when I was a student, a doctoral student in Paris, I studied with Paul Recur,

02:55 - who was writing at the time about, Hospitality within, Europe. He called it linguistic hospitality in exchange of stories and of memories between the formerly warring nations of Europe. This, again, is post World War, post Hiroshima, post, Holocaust, post school lags. So it was a very pressing need, as it were to think about how we can create a European community after so much devastation, and not just in the 20th century,

03:26 - but going back through the religious wars and, and so on the beginnings of European history, in any case, and I might add world history. But, so, so this was a topic that was very central to the debates in Paris at the time, again, in the mid, mid seventies. And my other, teachers there, Levina, Emmanuel Levina, a Jew who had escaped the Holocaust, lost many of his family in the Holocaust, Jacque Deida, also a Jewish thinker who very much was, trying to think

03:56 - through the question of hospitality. Julia cva, another great teacher of mine with whom I did research, who wrote about the origins of hospitality and the need to discover, that we are strangers to ourselves. in other words, we react very often to strangers coming to our nation, coming to our society, coming to our community very often with, with hostility. But until we recognize that within ourselves, there is a stranger that we very often project down

04:27 - to others, our shadow, our darkness, our fears, our anxieties, until we do that inner work of, reckoning with the stranger within us, we can never, which in, in a way, is our unconscious, our unconscious psyche. We can never fully, appreciate how important it is to recognize, acknowledge and welcome the Stranger Without. But I founded the Guest book Project in 2009, with a number of colleagues in, Boston College, and also some colleagues in MIT here in Boston.

04:59 - And, we, we ran it initially as a, an academic, InterVarsity seminar for, faculty members, interdisciplinary, very interdisciplinary across, across, in fact, 15 different disciplines, around the question of, hostility and hospitality, starting with this basic fact, linguistic fact that most European, Indo-European languages share a term that is ambiguous, that can mean either, enemy or friend. I mentioned host already in relation to Latin

05:37 - that is at the root of hostility and hospitality, but also other languages xal in, in Greek, which can give rise to xenophobia or xeno flia, in other words, hospitality or, guest for example, guest guest in, in German, hence our word guest in English. but again, the, the, the guest ghast can be ghastly, can be the ghost, can be the monster, can be the outsider, and so on and so forth. When can go through the various, the various languages,

06:07 - and you find this, this ambivalent root word, and this is carried in turn, not just linguistically, but narratively in the different origin stories of, most, wisdom traditions, within the west, but also within the east and further afield indigenous cultures. But I concentrated mainly in the guest bank, guest book on the, the European, origins of, of the term and the stories. And of course, there is the Greek story of the,

06:39 - the Gods appearing as, as strangers, for example, Zeus and Hermes who appear to bachus and philemon in the form of strangers. And initially, they are rejected, until they share food and shake hands. And in that gesture, that carnal gesture of sharing the hostility turns into, into hospitality, and they are revealed as, as divine, the former monstrous enemies are revealed as divine. You find a similar thing in the Abrahamic stories.

07:08 - Abraham, and Sarah received the stranger's ur in, in, in, in, in Hebrew that appear out of the, out of the desert, they share food. And the three persons are then revealed as, as divine. And St. Paul, of course, in the Christian tradition has a, a famous phrase about, always welcome the stranger because you may be encountering an angel in disguise. And, and Jesus Christ, in Matthew 25, when he's asked

07:38 - to identify who he is, was, and will be, says, five times in Matthew 25, I will be a stranger. I am the stranger. I was the stranger that asked for food and water, and you gave it to me, or you did not give it to me, hostility or hospitality. So in, in these traditions, it carries into Islam very importantly also where food, is, is a very important part of moving from hostility to hospitality.

08:03 - The sharing of food, these origin stories, as I call them, these seminal or primal narratives, suggest that one of the first, gestures of civilization is the handshake, is the sharing of food, is the welcoming of the stranger as enemy, who then converts into friend ally. It's binary as you tell the story simply, it's, it's not binary when one looks deeply into it. And that was part indeed of our research, because, in 99% of cases, of course, we're dealing not

08:40 - with hostility, pure hostility, or pure hospitality, which in fact, Deida argues and levina is impossible. It's divine. Humans can't have access to it. So very often, the stories of pure hospitality are told in sacred stories, but they, they serve as a model, as an ideal of the, of the imagination as to how we should, could, might be if we could move from pure, hostility to pure hospitality.

09:08 - But for the most part, we're in the middle. We're in what Deida calls hospitality, which is a nice neologism for the mix of hostility and hospitality. And therefore, it's always a reckoning. It's always a question of discernment. You know, Dorothy Day, who set up these hospitality houses in Detroit and, and Harlem in New York, and so on, you know, for the underprivileged and the poor.

09:29 - she would say when there was a knock at the door at three o'clock in the morning, and she answers it, and somebody asked to come in, she said, I, how do I know whether it's the Marky Daad or, or Jesus Christ? And that's always a call as to who you let into your hospitality house, because if they are murderers and wife, beaters and rapists, then they could injure and harm those within the home, within the,

09:54 - within the sanctuary. but at the same time, they may be, angels in disguise. And for the, for the most part, or very often, they may be a mix of both. So that's the wager of hospitality. It's not a given. you know, like any of these wonderful words, love, hospitality, peace, justice, they sound great, but they remain sort of just rhetorical terms until, and unless one does that, that work of parsing and,

10:24 - and negotiating and wagering on, on the different possibilities of, of hospitality and hostility within a particular lived human situation, which is very complex and layered. Again, this is a way of analyzing what hospitality means and how it works, because the title of the book, radical Hospitality, sorry, the subtitle is from Thought to Action. And so it's not just a question of analyzing

10:53 - the linguistic origins of the terms for hospitality or indeed the philosophies of hospitality going from Homer and the Greeks through the Latins up into, you know, contemporary, continental or analytic philosophy. that's all very helpful and very important from the point of view of academic scholarship. But one also has to look at real situations. So in, in reality, hospitality works, I argue, we argue in the book, in forming ways,

11:20 - linguistic hospitality, narrative hospitality, confessional hospitality, and carnal hospitality, and a wick word on each. linguistic comes from the fact that, in translation, there is a host language and there is a guest language. And we're translating all the time, not just between people who speak different languages, that's the most obvious sense of translation. But every time we meet a person, we are actually be they foreign

11:44 - or be they familiar, we are actually translating, there's always a host language, my language, and the other's language. So translation is the attempt to reach sort of a delicate balance between a fidelity to one's own resources of meaning. otherwise there's no host to receive a guest, language, speaker. and on the other hand, one must be aware of the fact that the other's language, the other's set of meanings

12:15 - and values, is such that they may have something that challenges me, that's different from me, that is basically other than what I have been familiar with. So there's always that balance between a fidelity to one's host language that receives the other into one's linguistic sphere, one's linguistic world, and then this sensitivity attunement and, humility before the strangeness and otherness of the others' language.

12:45 - And in any great translation, you know, of the Greeks, of the, of the, the biblical sep or whatever, there, there's always a shock where the, the Hebrew language is renewed as it's translated into Greek, and the Greek is challenged and opened up by the arrival of these Hebrew break meanings. So this is true of any translation. I mean, I'm, I'm talking about a classic one. In any case, that's a word on on, on linguistic, hospitality, which as I say,

13:15 - is not just a question of translating. The great texts are between foreign languages, but also what we do in our everyday lives when we meet another person and, and listen and talk and communicate. I'll be very brief on the others narrative. Hospitality is the sharing, of stories, of memories. one's national memory, for example, can be victory in terms of the battle of the boy in her, you know, the Battle of Navarre. But for the other nation, it may be a, a story of defeat

13:44 - and failure in humiliation and dispossession and disinheritance. So it's very important to exchange stories to exchange wounds, particularly post World War. This was very important for Paul Reker in his famous essay on New Ethos for Europe, based on an exchange of narrative memories, actual memories of, of, of pain, and actual memories of desire, aspiration, because there are potential memories too that have never

14:08 - yet been realized in history. So this exchange of narratives is very important in the creation of, hospitality as we move through and beyond hostility. But we have to acknowledge, first of all, the stories of pain suffering, violence, betrayal that separate communities. in Northern Ireland, for example, this was very important in bringing Protestants and Catholics, nationalists

14:33 - and unionists together to exchange their stories, which were very, very different. and then to create a third story. So that's narrative, hospitality. then confessional hospitality simply is, is is between different religions, because religious violence or a lot of violence, political violence is based on religious violence, even if it's secularized, we need to get back to those roots, see what's happening, see

14:58 - how religions have been carriers of huge, scapegoating, demonization division. Look at the Holy Wars, the Poms, the camp, the, the, the, the, the Crusades. But at the same time, also, religions can be and have been carriers of peace and hospitality and justice. So that's the confessional. And in fact, one of our guest book books was called, between Religions, hosting The Stranger Between Religions.

15:25 - We went into the five major Wisdom traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism. And then finally, carnal Hospitality is simply the handshake, is the fact that it's not just a question of words, linguistic, hospitality, or stories, or indeed religions. It's also a question of hand to hand, hospitality. And that's very often expressed in the handshake, most emblematically, but also in the sharing of food. and we look at various, you know, great stories,

15:57 - baed Feast, Victor, Hugo, and others, where this question of the sharing of food and the handshake is absolutely fundamental in turning people from a situation of hostility and enmity and violence into, into, peace and hospitality. In our classes here in Boston, we create an atmosphere where, where, and an opportunity where students from different religions, different, races, different backgrounds, come together, tell their respective story stories to each other,

16:34 - share those stories, exchange those stories, and then as we put it, exchanging stories, changing histories. And then the challenge is how, how do historical ities, translate into stories? And then in the exchange of stories, how can that in turn have an impact, on history, on action? And the, the subtitle, as I mentioned earlier, of Radical Hospitality, the book is from Thought to Action. So they actually engage in the exchange of stories.

17:06 - And that exchange of stories then is, videotaped. And we post those stories, on our website, the guestbook website, guestbook project.com, and other, students. We mainly deal with young people, not always, but mainly, in other universities, colleges, schools, including secondary schools. In Ireland, Northern Ireland, we work mainly in secondary schools, bringing together Protestants

17:34 - and Catholics, unionists and nationalists. In one instance, the video while which they made together was, are featured, two girls from different schools in, in Derry, London, der two, two different names for the, for the city divided of course, between the city itself, the diamond, and then the bog side, where the Nationalist Catholics, Republicans resided. Anyway, they tell their respective stories as to how for the Protestant unionist loyalist, young woman,

18:06 - in, in, in high school, technically school, you know, the walls of dairy protect that community, that British unionist community from Backwardness and from, from violence, from invasion, preserves, civic rights and so on, and the Bill of Rights. And, and then the Catholic Guard tells how for her, this, the wall represented dispossession and exclusion and, and, and, and other kind of violence. And then they exchange uniforms and go into their respective schools

18:33 - and their respective forbidden territory, so to speak. And they create a sense of humor as they do. So they literally go in, drag into each other's communities, and then they make a video about it. And the, they actually became, you know, peace amba, young peace ambassadors going into different schools on both sides of the border, showing their guest book, movie, and then discussing it with other students. And of course, this extends further. There was an exchange between, Israeli

18:59 - Palestinian students with the Northern Irish students, then with the Croatian students, Croatian and Serbian students. And it sets up a sort of an international, laboratory, without walls where people can exchange stories in the hopes of changing history. By creating a new story together. They acknowledge the story of enmity, and then project, create, invent a story of hospitality. so that becomes a sort of a digital classroom without walls, so to speak.

19:29 - Once they post their videos and exchange those videos with others, I would hope that they take a sense of just how deeply, stories can wound and how miraculously they can heal. So radical hospitalities recognizing Radis, the root, of hostility in the human being. Going back to Cane and Abel, going back to Prometheus and Prometheus, all the origin stories carry this sense of hostility, memetic rivalry, competition, violence,

20:07 - but then also how, that history of violence and hostility can be converted into stories, narratives, of hospitality. And so that that mix of hostility, hospitality, which we can call hospitality, creates in the reader a sense of hope, that looking out there at, at how stories as propagandistic, as prejudicial can wound harm, carry malice. betrayal enmity can also be used reused and transformed into, new stories

20:44 - of hospitality. It's like the old adage, you know, the hair of the dog that bit you, and you will find the cure, therefore, you find the disease and stories can kill, but stories can also cure. That's what I would hope the reader will take from this.

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