“Reverse Hospitality”: Luke 10 as a Pedagogy of Desire

[Jamie Wilson]

Abstract:

This paper will examine the bodily formation of our imagination for hospitality, and it will argue that Jesus was on to something vital when he sent his disciples out two by two to be hosted by Samaritans. He was inviting them into the habits and routines of a stranger and stripping them of all cultural capital.  At a time when skepticism of the church is massive and well grounded, Luke 10 offers an urgently need needed doorway from anxiety to engagement.   Re-visioning the agency of God and re-discovering an authentic encounter between the Gospel and our culture may require a radical dislocation from the comforts of home.

I begin with a proposal for mapping cultural transformation that I am calling the Hospitality Imaginary.  I define the Hospitality Imaginary as the subset of any cultural imaginary in which the practice of hospitality is imagined.  This framework will allow analysis of how a cultural group understands themselves with respect to the stranger.  The fundamental elements of the Hospitality Imaginary are the home, the host, and the stranger.

Next, I will analyze the formation of that imagination.  How is it shaped?  How might it be reshaped?  In doing so, I hope to provide a thicker account of missional imagination. I will argue that as we perform hospitality, our habitual routines give rise to our imagination for home, host, and stranger.  In other words, imagination is generated out of the embodied routines that constitute our daily lives.

The full paper is attached to this post.