Radical Hospitality

Richard Kearney (Author) Richard Kearney is Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and author and editor of more than forty books on contemporary philosophy and culture. He is founding editor of the Guestbook Project and has been engaged in developing a postnationalist philosophy of peace and empathy over several decades. His most relevant books on this subject include Strangers, Gods and Monsters (2001), Postnationalist Ireland (1998), Hosting the Stranger (2012), Phenomenologies of the Stranger (2010), Imagination Now (2019), and Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense (2021). Melissa Fitzpatrick (Author) Melissa Fitzpatrick is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Ethics for the Portico Program in Boston College's Carroll School of Management and the Director of Pedagogy for Guestbook Project. Her research focuses on the intersection between contemporary virtue ethics and post-Kantian continental philosophy. She has also done integrated teaching, research, and community outreach in pre-college philosophy in the Mississippi Delta and on the Mexican-American border in El Paso, Texas.

Introduction: Why Hospitality Now? 1 PART I: FOUR FACES OF HOSPITALITY: LINGUISTIC, NARRATIVE, CONFESSIONAL, CARNAL Richard Kearney 1 Linguistic Hospitality: The Risk of Translation 17 2 Narrative Hospitality: Three Pedagogical Experiments 24 3 Confessional Hospitality: Translating across Faith Cultures 43 4 Carnal Hospitality: Gesturing beyond Apartheid 49 PART II: HOSPITALITY AND MORAL PSYCHOLOGY: EXPLORING THE BORDER BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE Melissa Fitzpatrick 5 Hospitality beyond Borders: The Case of Kant 61 6 Impossible Hospitality: From Levinas to Arendt 75 7 Teleological Hospitality: The Case of Contemporary Virtue Ethics 88 8 Hospitality in the Classroom 97 Postscript: Hospitality's New Frontier: The Nonhuman Other 105 Acknowledgments 111 Notes 113 Bibliography 137 Index 145

This book is long overdue and much needed. Highly recommended.-- "Choice" In a time of increasing hostility and suspicion of the stranger, Radical Hospitality could not be more welcome. It is descriptively rich in historical examples and concrete phenomenologies of hospitality in all its embodiments. The book goes beyond mere description to grasp the ethics of hospitable interactions, giving nuance to the ambiguities of these interactions and showing their fragility as well as their necessity. Above all, Kearney and Fitzpatrick show how effective acts of hospitality at once recognize human fragility and vulnerability and yet provide the strength and inspiration to pursue peace.---Edward S. Casey, Stony Brook University, author of The World on Edge