The extending of hospitality is a common element in every culture. Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to welcome people into our home from every part of the world. Being a good host can be challenging sometimes, but also fun as we encounter people very different from ourselves. These encounters enlarge our worlds even as they challenge our skills in making people welcome. We have to think about welcoming customs (shoes on/shoes off for example), foods that may not be acceptable, how meals are served, how we engage in conversation and so much more. It can be both fascinating and frustrating but I am so glad that we’ve been able to get so much bigger a sense of the world through the people who have graced our table.
I’ve been writing recently on various types of diversity. Recently, I was asked to co-present a workshop on “intellectual hospitality” that led me to reflect on how we engage intellectual diversity. That is how do we welcome ideas, and the people who bear them, when these might be very different from the way we think? This actually seems to me to be an urgently needed skill because everywhere we turn, we encounter multiple, and often conflicting perspectives, particularly in the market place of ideas called higher education. Whether it is economic theories, political theories, cosmology, literary criticism or religion and spirituality, we encounter multiple perspectives, often vigorously, and sometimes viciously at odds with each other. This seems to be intensified by the insular communities we often seem to form that define themselves by their opposition to the ideas of other, often equally insular communities. In many places, we seem to be losing the capacity to engage and welcome each other as human beings even while we may have vigorous discussions about our most deeply held ideas.
Here are a few of my musings on what it might take to practice “intellectual hospitality” with those outside my own community of belief (in my case, a particular set of Christian communities operating within the landscape of higher education).
1. Intellectual hospitality does not commit me to adopt the ideas, values, and world view of the person who I’m welcoming into conversation. Just as welcoming guests who are more comfortable “shoes off” to remove their shoes in my home doesn’t commit me to change our practice of being a “shoes on” household in our personal life, entertaining the ideas of another doesn’t commit me to adopt those ideas as my own.
2. At the same time, intellectual hospitality can be scary. Let’s admit that. We may fear that something we hold deeply will be shown lacking or baseless in light of the other’s ideas. And sometimes it is easier to keep the other at arms length or even on the other side of an ideological wall because it is easier to lob criticisms based on our own preconceptions of each other’s ideas than to really encounter them. It seems that one of the requirements of intellectual hospitality is that we love truth more than we love holding onto our dearest ideas or being “right”.
3. Intellectual hospitality means realizing that others may have thought as deeply (or more) about their ideas as we have. It means that we respect each other’s sincerity by neither belittling even the things we disagree with nor expecting that one should readily change their mind about things they’ve thought and believed deeply. In other words, we don’t start from the presumption that the other is “shallow”.
4. Intellectual hospitality involves curiosity. And perhaps this is an issue for us at times. Do we really wonder why someone else who seems as equally thoughtful as ourselves would arrive at very different conclusions? Do we really want to “walk in their shoes” and really understand their ideas? Do we want to learn from someone who has delved deeply into something we know little or nothing of?
5. We honor another person when we take the time and effort to really understand what they are saying. To take the time to read something someone has written before we meet and talk with them is to say, “I’m really interested in the things you’ve poured your life into.” It means reading or listening to understand before engaging in any kind of critique–of suspending judgment long enough to really understand the other.
6. In any form of hospitality, we look for what we have in common with and what we admire in the other person. It seems that this must also be true with regard to intellectual hospitality. I’ve had wonderful conversations with committed atheists in which we’ve shared a commitment to truth and to the idea that we shouldn’t believe something simply because we’ve been raised that way.
7. Intellectual hospitality doesn’t exclude persuasion but it honors the freedom of another person to believe or change one’s beliefs not out of emotional duress but out of personal reflection and choice. Any of us who believe something to be true have reasons we are persuaded are valid not only for us but at least potentially for the wider human community. Persuasion is always an important part of any conversation of substance. The alternative is nice, insipid conversations of the variety that replay the stale mantra, “You’ve got your truth, I’ve got mine.”
8. It seems that one of the values of this kind of hospitality is that we don’t get to remain in our little enclaves in this pluralistic world. Nor do we get to conform everyone to our point of view. What this kind of hospitality seems to open up is the opportunity to figure out how will we work together, whether as colleagues in a university, members in a community, or citizens in a nation. In the process, we might find ourselves enriched and our own capacities enhanced. It could be that we find our own beliefs more deeply confirmed. It might be that we re-think some of them. Or we might even change our mind.
It is sad that the human condition often seems to make difference a cause for hostility. But must it be? Might intellectual hospitality promote the kind of respectful yet robust conversations that allow us to find sufficient places of common ground, imperfect to be sure, but sufficient to protect the freedom of all to pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful?
Bob on Books 
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I have been thinking about your essay for several days, knowing that there was something I did not like, something that I felt was wrong. Let me try to articulate this.
Though I heartily welcome your comments about hospitality and the need for the same by Christians, I realized that we live and work in enterprises and universities which we do not control and which offer us their hospitality.
Yes, we can offer hospitality in our homes and the groups we join, whether church or InterVarsity, et al, but those entities are not the academic enterprises, departments, bodies of knowledge and research programs, and universities which have drawn us to the places where we live and work, and which welcome us and offer us their hospitality.
I appreciate what Nicholas Wolterstorff teaches in this interview report, wrongly titled “Earning a Vocie”, and should be “Learning a Voice, Earning a Hearing.”
http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/3931/earning-your-voice/
The key passage is at the very top – “”I was a participant in a shared human enterprise, rather than a combatant against the enterprise. That was crucial.”
Halfway down, Wolterstorff says this – “Roger Lundin, from Wheaton, once suggested to me a good metaphor for this. He said to me, twenty years ago, I suppose, “You philosophers found a voice long before the rest of us did.” That’s a very good metaphor. You have to find a voice whereby what you say can be heard…” Wolterstorff then goes on to explain that a lot of students landed at Yale, some of them in his philosophy classes, unprepared for the hospitality they were offered.
There is so much more which could, probably should be said. I will end it here with this from Wolterstorff –
“I am a participant in a shared human enterprise…..”. The more I have understood this, the more I have felt included in this university enterrprise, and the the more opportunities I have seen for contributing.
Hospitality is a good term, idea to describe the feeling I have about my part in this community, but I now understand this as a shared hospitality, initiated by the human enterprise of this university in which “I am a participant.”
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John, thank you for your comments. It is true that I framed this post in the context of Christian communities but part of the reason for doing so was to explore the habits of thinking that are necessary for Christians to rejoin the hospitality extended by the broader enterprise, and to do so in the public context of the university, not merely in private contexts. So often, Christians define their identity, and thus their posture, in the university as adversarial. What I want to encourage is indeed the very thing Wolterstorff speaks of as participating alongside others rather than acting as a combatant. There is a giving and receiving of hospitality in the human enterprise of which you speak, and unfortunately, much of the Christian community, even in academia has not been very good at either receiving or extending that hospitality and has often self-isolated.That said, my approach in this blog is to write honestly from my own context and yet try to frame my ideas in terms that are broadly applicable. The only time I speak in terms that are explicitly Christian is in naming my own context.
I would be less than candid if I were to say that the university is always an intellectually hospitable place. Sadly the students and faculty I work with have all faced disrespectful references to Christians and the Christian faith, or more broad-brushed screeds against religion in general not grounded in respectful difference but thinly or not so thinly veiled hostility. While it is true that there are many places where the kind of hospitality you describe is extended into which I would hope we enter fully, there are also places, at least at our institution, where I wish it were more the case. Nevertheless, in such situations, I think the call of the Christian community is to extend hospitality even where it is not reciprocated in a way that invites others in the university to live up to its shared ideals. There is indeed a shared human enterprise of inquiry that affords us great opportunity for thoughtful dialogue around great and vital questions.
Thanks for taking the time to both think, and write at length in response to this post. And thanks so much for your work that seeks to embody the ideas of which you write!
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Thanks Bob, for your kind response. I could not agree more with your remark and concern that “So often, Christians define their identity, and thus their posture, in the university as adversarial. …”
It is exactly this attitude which concerns me the most, and which then prompted the memory of Wolterstorff’s remark about being “a participant”, not “a combatant”. So your remarks about hospitality are indeed spot on in a general way.
And, I know as well, though the problem does not seem to have been so severe here at The University of Chicago, possibly because of the Divinity School which is part of this university, the problem of professors who are less than enthusiastic about religion, and Christianity in particular.
However, I have been very much prodded by the Roman Catholic Lumen Christi Institute here at The UofC, and their ability to be active “participants” in the academic life here – in the programs they have presented over the last 15 plus years, and the partnerships they have established with UofC departments and programs.
http://www.lumenchristi.org/about-us/
If Lumen Christi can do this, we can too.
However, there is a difference, which presents an enormous challenge for us. The Roman Catholics have a long history of scholarship and science, embodied in their Pontifical Academics, most notably the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences, which was founded in 1603 with Galileo an early member, reestablished in 1847, reorganized in 1936, and with a long list of academicians and scientists who have been members.
http://www.casinapioiv.va/content/accademia/en/academicians.html
One does not “learn a voice” alone, nor in an instant. In the interview I cited before, Wolterstorff speaks of fellow scholars at Calvin College who were instrumental in his personal development, and the development of new work in philosophy, starting 50 years ago. We too will need to keep learning the art of hospitality, the art of being “participants” in the enterprise of the university, both by tagging along with what others are doing and by creating new opportunities ourselves – over the long haul !!
In short, Bob, the challenge you present to learn “hospitality” is a vastly important one. Combine that with “learning a voice” in order to become fully “a participant” and we have before us many important challenges, knowing that others already are full participants, which we too can become, knowing that there are many years of work ahead for us to do.
ps. In order to remind us all that Protestant scholars and scientists have begun to “learn a voice” in order to become active “participants”, take a look at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory
http://cslr.law.emory.edu/
and the Faraday Institute for the Study of Law and Religion at Cambridge.
http://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/
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This is a great essay. It’s tone and content dovetail nicely with my own views and work with the Evangelical Chapter of the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy (www.EvangelicalFRD.org) and The World Table conversation forum with “The Way of Openness” ethical guidelines (www.theworldtable.org). Thanks so much for addressing this topic and in this way.
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Thank you, John!
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Matt, thanks for linking to this post, an oldie but goodie. Just visited your blog and discovered you are friends with my colleague Lisa Liou. Small world! Blessings!
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