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And this brings up a final bit of reflection: hospitality includes receiving. When we are the recipients—when we stay with relatives, for example, we are called to practice another sort of hospitality: to receive with humility, gratitude, and an uncritical spirit what is offered in love—to remember that we are to receive every good thing as from the hand of God. To consider hospitality in this way is to recognize that it always involves exchange—and that we are never in a position to calculate the final value of what is given and what is received. Portia's words about the quality of mercy apply also to this virtue, rightly exercised: "It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christianity Today magazine.
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In a May 2000 Christianity Today article, Stephen Winzenburg lamented, "Whatever Happened to Hospitality? | Even in churches, many believers feel safer ignoring those they don't know."

A recent issue of Christianity Today looks at how Florida churches are extending hospitality to Haitian immigrants. Hospitality has also been covered by several of Christianity Today's sister publications. Books & Culture reviewed Christine Pohl's Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition. Your Church magazine has an article on building hospitality into historic churches, and Marriage Partnership looks at how husbands and wives can often have different approaches to hospitality. Virtue, now sadly defunct, offers an article on the virtue of hospitality. Leadership has two articles on hospitality. The first discusses ways churches can practice hospitality toward those new to a church. The second looks at how one pastor and his wife opened up their home to parishioners and the lessons they've learned from that experience. Leadership also discusses how churches can function in an age of rampant individualism.

"Spirtuality of Work in the Hospitality Industry" compares the practice of hospitality in classical, biblical, and modern worlds. David Gowler of Emory University has posted an essay on Jesus' hospitality that shows how Jesus' understanding of hospitality differed from that of the scribes and Pharisees.

Christine Pohl wrote an article for Sojourners magazine summarizing many of the themes of her book on hospitality. The Diocese of Antwerp (Belgium) also has a brief historical overview of Christian hospitality.

Previous McEntyre columns for Christianity Today include:

Rx for Moral Fussbudgets | Good guilt entails more than repentance for merely personal sins. (Mar. 19, 2001)

Community, Not Commodity | Let us acknowledge, and even mourn, what we lose when worship meets media. (Jan. 16, 2001)

Nice Is Not the Point | Sometimes love is sharp, hard-edged, confusing, and seemingly unfair. (Nov. 29, 2000)

The Fullness of Time | I'd like life to be a series of pauses like a poem, rather than a fast-paced, page-turner airport novel. (Oct. 12, 2000)

'I've Been Through Things' | Meditating on "Honor your father and your mother." (Sept. 6, 2000)

Silence Is to Dwell In | An hour of quiet is a rare gift, hard to come by in an ordinary week, even for those who seek it. (Aug. 10, 2000)

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April 23 2001, Vol. 45, No. 6