Christian Theological-Philosophical Examination of the Foundations of Hospitality

Abstract

The research carried out in this presentation offers us a moral perspective of hospitality in which the believing freedom is configured as an intentionality of faith. Both the research in the biblical part and in the philosophical one, have circumscribed the foundational structures of hospitality as universally anthropological in its theological connection and intrinsic human dynamic. 
In this way, the premises of the overall hermeneutics of human hospitability are outlined in the light of Revelation, in which the mystery of Christ becomes the theological place of his full and definitive comprehension, and its sequela as a form of its full realization. 
The phenomenology of inter-subjectivity presents the person in relationship as the ontological foundation of hospitality which, in the light of Revelation, becomes the hermeneutical path and the very reason for its credibility. The dynamics of interpersonal relationships in a hospitable relationship imply being-with-the-other and being-for-the-other, in a continuous movement of openness to otherness in the agape order. This dynamic inscribes it fully in the foundation of the register of Christian moral action. The original human, described by the biblical revelation, showed his ability to disclose the sense of God's original intention in welcoming hospitable, as the act of conscious and responsible freedom for the good of the other, and as a gift and care, able to overcome any strangeness/difference, even the most radical.