Author : Beth Ritter-Conn
Release : 2013
Genre : Hospitality
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK

Book Synopsis Divine Disruption by : Beth Ritter-Conn

Download or read book Divine Disruption written by Beth Ritter-Conn. This book was released on 2013. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation argues that hospitality is best understood as philoxenia, love of the stranger, where the stranger is understood as an instantiation of the imago Dei, defined as the disruptive coming-to-presence of the divine in the world. It addresses this dynamic specifically from within the religio-cultural context of the American Deep South, where hospitality is a cultural value yet has not always been practiced in this sense. It shows that the histories and habitus that have formed and conditioned each person have often prevented the recognition of some embodied human subjects as able to reflect this imago Dei and therefore have excluded these subjects from participation in the exchange of hospitality. To do so, it first examines the historical theological connection between the doctrine of the imago Dei and the practice of hospitality. Then, engaging the fields of phenomenology and psychoanalysis as well as studies of bodily and cultural memory, it suggests that the hostility experienced by particular kinds of bodies specifically, but not exclusively, in the South has led to a culture characterized by a habitus of shame that prevents authentic mutual welcome. It offers the theological category of anamnesis as a way to begin a process of working through this shame. Next, using insights from the field of phenomenology and from contemporary theologians of the body, it establishes the embodied human subject as a socially constituted, mysterious multiplicity resistant to totalization, and it posits flesh as the key to humans' vulnerability to one another. and this as the ground of ethical relations. Finally, it argues that awareness of this common vulnerability may lead to repeated, habitual acts of kenosis and "making-room," thus transforming shared spaces, including the cosmos itself, into places characterized by hospitality. The dissertation suggests that by explicitly identifying the processes of history that have shaped each person and by attending to our common vulnerability to norms and representation, we can better embody and recognize the imago Dei, thus expanding the understanding of Christian hospitality as a habit of welcoming the continual, disruptive coming-to-presence of the divine in the world.