There are a lot of ways to speak about hospitality, probably as many ways as there are to be hospitable. But, I particularly love thinking about how our hospitality informs our ways of seeing the world, and how our ways of seeing the world inform our hospitable actions. Hospitality seems to be circular, and deeply embedded in the Christian narrative: “Hospitality is a central virtue of the biblical tradition itself, where God is always using the stranger to introduce us to strangeness of truth. To be inhospitable to strangers or strange ideas, however unsettling they may be, is to be hostile to the possibility of truth; hospitality is not only an ethical virtue but an epistemological one as
Change is afoot. Cooler mornings, longer nights, louder cicadas, and geese in the sky. I’ve loved late August since childhood when ripe blackberries, crisp early apples and a new school year all happened at once. The ancient Celts also recognized the special gifts of this time and celebrated August as the season of Lammas, the early harvest, and it is indeed a richly mixed-up time. August reminds me of the “yes—and” dynamic in the cycle of life. The yes of a ripening garden and the work of picking, preparing and preserving the crops. The yes of a summer intern’s enthusiasm and growing expertise and her impending graduation with its demand for finding a real job and starting a career. T
