Christian Educators Journal: October 2023

Christian Educators Journal October 2023 Vol. 63 No. 1

Hospitality Teaching and Learning Civic Hospitality Our Civics and God’s Hospitality Civic Hospitality and the Challenges of/to Pluralism Hospitality, Politics, and Human Nature Hospitality and Schools Hermeneutics, Hospitality, and the Bible Classroom Don’t Be a Jonah

Future Issues December 2023—Parent Partnerships Connecting and communicating with parents is one of the most important yet challenging aspects of education in the twenty-first century.

While the media is filled with negative labels like “helicopter” or “snowplow” parents and political leaders have weaponized parent-run school boards, parents are actually vital and valuable agents in their students’ academic and spiritual education. So: how does your school work with them? What are the best practices for communication at various grade levels? How do you encourage appropriate levels of involvement from parents? What do parent-teacher conferences look like at your school? Do you get parents into the building for career chats, field trips, or volunteering? What assignments do you give in class that encourage students to engage with their parents? We want to hear the success stories of how you reassured parents about a touchy curriculum choice or enticed parents to attend a college fair.

February 2024—Inclusive Education Christian schools have long been known as welcoming and supportive communities for students with a variety of learning needs. It has been more than a decade since CEJ has focused on inclusive education, and we are eager to hear how schools have found creative ways to include and support students with disabilities in the body of Christ. Ideally, this issue will include students with physical disabilities (e.g., Spina bifida, limited mobility, or visual impairments), cognitive impairments or emotional disabilities (e.g., Down syndrome, emotional impairment), or neurodivergences (e.g., autism, ADHD). What are the best practices for serving these students in the general education classroom? What unique programs does your school offer to enrich these students and those around them (sports, clubs, tutoring partnerships)? How do you train aides, parapros, and faculty alike? What physical spaces and adaptations do you offer? We’re hoping to hear from classroom teachers, support staff, inclusion coordinators, parents, and even students themselves.

Proposals (informal—just email us your idea!) are due October 13. Articles are due November 13 .

April 2024—Resource Review Each year we highlight the best books, films, websites, teaching tools, and other resources for Christian school teachers. We publish reviews of student-facing material (like which books to stock in your classroom library), as well as materials relevant to school staff (like curricula or books about teaching). Articles may focus on one text or may be written in a list style featuring multiple texts around a particular theme.

Proposals (informal—just email us your idea!) are due December 29. Articles are due January 29

Contents

3 Editorial 4 Teaching and Learning Civic Hospitality: Where Do We Start?

DAVID I. SMITH

9 Our Civics and God’s Hospitality MATTHEW KAEMINGK

13 Civic Hospitality and the

Challenges of/to Pluralism KEVIN R. den DULK

22 Hospitality, Politics, and Human Nature MICAH WATSON

26 Hospitality and Schools: Four Lenses DAVID I. SMITH

31 Herman Who? Hermeneutics, Hospitality, and the Bible Classroom MARK VANDERWERF

35 Don’t Be a Jonah KELLI BOENDER

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Christian Educators Journal Vol. 63 No. 1, October 2023 cejonline.com Editor Abby Zwart cejeditor@gmail.com The Christian Educators Journal (CEJ) encourages letters to the editor in response to articles presented in the CEJ. Letters must be accompanied by the author’s name and email address. The CEJ reserves the right to edit letters for length and clarity. Where a letter addresses issues raised by the author of an article, the CEJ reserves the right to invite the article author to respond to the letter.

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Some back issues may be available in digital format.

Editorial

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ike many of our most important words, “hospitality” can carry a range of meanings. In contrast to the slick imagery of the hospitality industry and the parading of our good taste in Martha Stewart–­style entertaining, Jesus focused hospitality on welcoming the poor, taking the lowest seat at the table, and being known for eating with sinners (Luke 14:1–15:2). In Scripture, hospitality is not a gracious creation of space for others to appreciate our magnanimity, but a love of neighbor that does not rest on in-­group status or social standing. It receives others because they are created and cared for

by God. The essays in this issue grew out of a multi-­year project at the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning and the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin University, with financial support from the Issachar Fund. The result, called the Civic Hospitality Project, focuses on hospitality as a public virtue and what that might have to do with how we learn to participate in society. The first article provides some background to the project and a brief introduction to the free resources that we created for schools. You can explore those resources at civichospitality.com.

Our project team drew together expertise from theology, political science, education theory, and the classroom. Given the various meanings that hospitality can have, we wanted our work to have a clear theological grounding. Matthew Kaemingk of Fuller Seminary, author of a recent book on hospi­tality and Muslim immigration, led this aspect of our conversation.

In this issue, his article similarly grounds us in a biblical theology of hospitality. Kevin den Dulk and Micah Watson were our political science experts, and their essays here offer insights into facets of the political and social context in which we are educating that make learning hospitality a vital need. My own work focuses on discussions of faith and teaching, and in my second contribution here I survey several ways of linking hospitality and schooling. Our teacher team consisted of Kelli Boender, Erik Ellefsen, David Tsui, and Mark VanderWerf. The essays here by Kelli and Mark highlight practical ways in which reflecting on hospitality has shaped their teaching choices and strategies.

We hope that these essays offer a way into conversations about Christian hospitality and education that are grounded theologically, examine our context carefully, take time to reflect on the nature of education, and yield classroom approaches that can be life ­giving for us, for our students, and for the communities to which they will contribute.

— David I. Smith

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Teaching and Learning Civic Hospitality: Where Do We Start?

DAVID I. SMITH

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Tolerance has its part to play. Yet it also falls short from a Christian viewpoint, not so much because it allows others too much space as because it demands too little of ourselves.

Hospitality asks me to actively make space for them and intentionally care for them because of the worth that God places on them.

n too many contexts around the world, it is easy to find a familiar refrain: our ability to relate constructively to one another in public spaces is being eroded by polarization, tribalization, fear, and anger. Unease is fueled by anxiety about the future combined with proximity to people who are different from us in their cultures, goals, ideologies, and priorities. Rushing to the ramparts to defend the boundaries of our enclave becomes a tempting response, one that can quickly turn ugly if it is not tempered by a fundamental love of neighbor (and not just of the neighbors we like). Loving those who seem to threaten us has never been one of Jesus’s more convenient commands.

A common liberal democratic response to such tensions has been to emphasize the need to learn tolerance. In any society, let alone in the globally networked webs of awareness that we currently inhabit, we will not agree with everyone, like everyone, or approve of everyone. The possibility of a society not riven by conflict rests on a certain willingness to put up with others, to let them be, to let the weeds (at least those we imagine to be weeds) grow with the wheat.

Tolerance has its part to play. Yet it also falls short from a Christian viewpoint, not so much because it allows others too much space as because it demands too little of ourselves. As Luke Bretherton notes, “Tolerance, understood as never challenging opinions others hold, reduces us to silence and inactivity, because to add to and seek to change what others think is by definition intolerant” (99). Tolerance therefore seems to motivate withdrawal from engagement. Tolerance secures a minimal level of peace but contains little that would move us to actively invest in making things better.

It leaves us with relatively little to say and little to work for as long as we are individually being left alone.

Does that push us back toward shouting from the ramparts until others admit we are right and should be in charge? Not necessarily. As Bretherton and others have noted, there is a key practice in the Christian tradition, rooted in the Scriptures, that addresses the presence of differences in a more constructive way. This is the practice of hospitality to strangers. While tolerance merely asks me to endure those who are different (a useful first step but a low bar), hospitality asks me to actively make space for them and intentionally care for them because of the worth that God places on them. Our reactions of irritation and defensiveness are not merely to be suppressed; they are to be replaced by love, a love that has to be more concrete than a pious sentiment.

This essay first appeared in Christian Teachers Journal volume 31 issue 1 and is reproduced here by permission.

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We need to pause here to note an immediate risk. Hospitality is a familiar, widely used word with a range of cultural meanings. Use it to search for images, and you are likely to see pictures of hotel reception areas and restaurants, referencing the “hospitality industry.” Chase it into lifestyle magazines, and you will find a vision of tasteful decor and ostentatious welcome that focuses on the host’s self-­presentation. Take your starting point from its default cultural meanings, and you are likely to end up with something somewhat distant from the biblical idea, something that focuses on preparing nice meals for your friends, showing off your lovely home, and networking with the folk who can be helpful to you.

The Bible consistently pushes back against this picture of hospitality.

Leviticus 19 includes two “as yourself ” commands—the first says to “love your neighbor as yourself ” and the second to “love [the stranger] as yourself ” (vv. 18, 33). Isaiah 25 pictures God as a host offering a banquet for all the nations with a specific focus on welcoming those overshadowed by death and disgrace. Jesus warned in Luke 14 against taking the best seat at the table and told us not to invite “your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors” (v. 12), but rather those from whom we will receive no benefit. In Matthew 25 he equated our ability to be hospitable to strangers with our ability to welcome him and connected our salvation to both. These and other biblical texts push us toward a more challenging image of hospitality. Here hospitality is active care extended to those who have not earned it, who are not the same as us, who are not attractive guests, and who may well not repay us. We are invited to reflect on the reality that as we welcome them, we welcome Christ. (To explore the biblical treatment of hospitality in more detail, see Jipp.)

This biblical web of references to hospitality led to a long Christian tradition of wrestling with the practice of hospitality. It is not a simple practice, and hard questions have regularly recurred. How do we distinguish guests we can welcome from those who will only do harm? How do we react to guests who take advantage of our hospitality and drain us? How much hospitality can we bear before we are worn thin or overwhelmed? Is this an individual or a community calling? There is much rich Christian reflection on all of these questions and more (see Pohl, Oden). It is not a matter to be approached glibly. Yet the challenges all sit nested within the framing call to love our neighbor, even when the neighbor does not have our favorite face.

What happens if we take this vision of hospitality as a lens for civic engagement, for interacting with others in public spaces and working with those who are different? Civic hospitality does not imply that we agree with everyone or approve of everything; to welcome others well, one does not need to become them. It does, however, imply being quick to listen, quick to serve, quick to care, even in the face of differences that might tempt us to fearful dismissal and preservation of our own comfort. It challenges us to love our neighbor even when the neighbor is a stranger, and to actively seek their good. It asks us to do more than tolerate others as long as they leave us alone.

Now what does this have to do with schooling? Our students already live in and are already influenced by a culture marked by polarization and hostility. When they graduate, they will go on to live, work, and contribute in the midst of others who are unlike them. They will of necessity have to position themselves amid differences. What kind of education might prepare them well to become principled agents of civic hospitality? Teaching Christian Educators Journal

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Hospitality is active care extended to those who have not earned it, who are not the same as us, who are not attractive guests, and who may well not repay us.

Civic hospitality does not imply that we agree with everyone or approve of everything.

Truth surely matters, yet students also need opportunities to learn and live into the dispositions that might enable them to live well amid difference.

The Christian practice of hospitality to strangers suggests an alternative to shouting or retreating when we encounter differences in the public square.

them the mechanics of the civics process will not be enough. Teaching them the right answers to societal questions and hoping they continue to disagree with those with whom we disagree also seems like a limited strategy in a complex and rapidly changing world. Truth surely matters, yet students also need opportunities to learn and live into the dispositions that might enable them to live well amid difference, not falling back on fear and control but grounding themselves in patience and care.

That kind of learning goal suggests some specific learning needs. Students in Christian schools need opportunities to think through the differences between biblical and present-­day accounts of hospitality. They need not just to read and write about hospitality, but to engage in learning practices that help them develop the specific skills and dispositions that sustain hospitality, such as slowing down, listening well, asking good questions, and discerning the pressures on their own choices and reactions. All of this creates specific challenges for teachers.

For several years I have been working with a team of gifted teachers and scholars to see if we could take some steps toward meeting these challenges.

The result is a new free resource developed jointly by the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning and the Paul B. Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics, both at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Building upon past work on Christian curriculum and pedagogy and on Christian engagement with the political sphere, the Civic Hospitality Project (civichospitality.com) provides a collection of free lesson plans and learning materials for secondary school students that offer starting points for addressing the needs described above. It also includes further resources for reflection on the topic of civic hospitality. A few of the lessons reference North American political contexts and systems and will need to be adapted for use elsewhere; most do not.

The emphasis throughout these resources is not simply on talking about hospitality as a topic. If we are going to teach civic hospitality well, then our pedagogical moves also need to model hospitality. The learning activities that we design have to plausibly lead to the ability to practice hospitality, and not just foster the ability to name it on a quiz. Created by experienced teachers and tested in a variety of schools, the lesson plans offer ways of engaging students in reflection on a Christian understanding of hospitality, exploration of how we concretely engage with others across differences, and practical work on the skills and dispositions needed to exercise hospitality well in public contexts. Because of this emphasis on pedagogy as well as content, even if you don’t teach social studies, you may find pedagogical ideas here that can inform your own work with students in other subject areas where they will encounter diverse perspectives.

The Christian practice of hospitality to strangers suggests an alternative to shouting or retreating when we encounter differences in the public square. The Civic Hospitality Project is hardly a quick fix or the final word.

Teachers are not the only influence on this aspect of students’ lives, nor can they simply flip a switch to mend society’s ills. But teachers are a significant influence, significant contributors to future culture, and significant witnesses to truth about the world. Our choices matter. Exploring pedagogical possibilities grounded in a hospitable vision can place us on a hopeful path to change that is founded on faith and love of neighbor rather than fear.

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Works Cited Bretherton, Luke. “Tolerance, Education and Hospitality: A Theological Proposal.” Studies in Christian Ethics, vol. 17, no. 1, 2004, pp. 80–103.

Jipp, Joshua W. Saved by Faith and Hospitality. Eerdmans, 2017.

Oden, Amy G. And You Welcomed Me: A Sourcebook on Hospitality in Early Christianity. Abingdon, 2001.

Pohl, Christine D. Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition. Eerdmans, 1999.

David I. Smith is director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning, coordinator of the de Vries Institute for Global Faculty Development, and professor of education at Calvin University. He is editor of the International Journal of Christianity and Education.

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Our Civics and God’s Hospitality MATTHEW KAEMINGK

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hat makes a civics course “Christian”? While there are an infinite number of ways in which a teacher might approach such a course, it’s fair to assume that any civics course that bears the label “Christian” would have at least some interest in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

I would go further and contend that the first question of a Christ-­centered course on civics is not “What work should Christians do in civic and political life?” but “What work has Christ already done?” and “What, where, why, and how is Christ doing this work in our civic and political life?” After all, if a Christian student knows what Christ is up to in the public square, they might have a sense of what it means to follow him when they get there themselves.

In recent years a wide variety of biblical scholars and theologians have made the case that the life, teachings, and work of Jesus is positively shot through with the concept and command of hospitality. Throughout the Gospels, readers find the virtue of hospitality featured prominently in the discussions of meals and tables, insiders and outsiders, hosts and guests.

And the climax of the gospel story is centered most importantly in Christ’s dramatic act of hospitality on the cross.

Hospitality, these scholars argue, is not limited to the second person of the Trinity or the gospel stories. From Genesis to Revelation Scripture reveals—again and again—that the God of Israel is a unique sort of deity, one particularly concerned with acts of hospitality. In the Old Testament, Yahweh is a divine being whose nature and work is marked by a predilection for spacemaking for his people and his creation.

For some readers, the word “hospitality” might conjure the image of a polite Victorian gathering around a spot of tea, cake, and jam. This is far from the tenor of hospitality the God of Israel displays. Yahweh’s hospitality in Scripture is often dramatic, unexpected, terrible, expansive, beautiful, and costly. It is the sort of divine spacemaking that opens the expanses of skies and seas, fills them with thunderous swarms of birds and fish. One that decorates the hills with mighty oaks and sequoias and flings nebulas and galaxies into the night skies. It is the sort of divine hospitality that parts the Red Sea for fleeing slaves and crushes their oppressors under its waves. It is the sort of hospitality that bids the hungry, orphan, foreigner, and widow to come into the camp to find justice, provision, and protection.

It’s the sort of hospitality that welcomes prodigal sons and daughters home with joyful tears, a strong embrace, and a large feast. It’s the sort of hospitality that responds to wounded enemies with a healing hand and makes space for rebels through a violent death on a cross.

It’s my contention that this is the sort of hospitality that should form the Christian Educators Journal

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If a Christian student knows what Christ is up to in the public square, they might have a sense of what it means to follow him when they get there themselves.

From Genesis to Revelation Scripture reveals— again and again—that the God of Israel is a unique sort of deity, one particularly concerned with acts of hospitality.

Politics is the organization of the public space.

It is, at its core, a spacemaking enterprise.

Similarly, citizens who wish to walk in the ways of the Lord have a responsibility to lead with an abundant and generous mindset toward their fellow citizens.

orienting center of any Christian approach to civics education. In a political environment that is anything but hospitable, young Christian citizens need to be equipped to create political spaces that protect, liberate, and care in the way of Jesus.

After all, what is political action but a spacemaking endeavor? Citizens and representatives, unions and judges, governors and administrators, political parties and pundits—who are these political actors but creators of political spaces? Each and every one of these agents are engaged in spacemaking questions. Who is in and who is out? Who will receive what, when, and why? Where will things be placed? Who will be invited to the table? How, where, and why will things be distributed to the guests? Politics is the organization of the public space. It is, at its core, a spacemaking enterprise.

If politics is a spacemaking endeavor, it would be wise for Christian students and educators alike to consider God’s posture toward the act of spacemaking. With that in mind, let’s take a brief tour through God’s hospitality in Scripture and consider a few potential implications for a Christian school course around civics and political life.

In the creation narrative, God is revealed first and foremost as a deity who—quite literally—makes space. Yahweh creates the spaces of heaven and earth, skies and seas, mountains and valleys. God creates these spaces not simply for God’s self, but for his creatures—the stars and planets, the fish and the animals, and ultimately for humans. In all of this Yahweh is revealed as a strange sort of deity—one who, out of nothing, generously “makes room” for others. God makes this space not out of a sense of personal need, but out of a sense of personal abundance. God’s very self is filled and animated by a joyful desire to share spaces with his creation and his creatures.

Here a civics class might consider the political ethics of abundance and space sharing. Rather than grasping, hoarding, and controlling creation, God delights in sharing creation with a sense of gratuitous abundance. God takes delight in offering space to others. Similarly, citizens who wish to walk in the ways of the Lord have a responsibility to lead with an abundant and generous mindset toward their fellow citizens. They endeavor to share and offer political space to others for others’ flourishing, not simply their own. All citizens should have access to the beauty and abundance of creation. Creation is not for hoarding and grasping but for sharing, care, community, and delight. When read with care, the Genesis story has important political and civic implications. It does not simply tell us how God creates space; it tells us how we who bear his image should create space as well. The human creation of political space should be an act of generosity, care, and relationship, not division and dominance.

As slaves in Egypt, the people of Israel had no land, no home, no place to call their own. Making bricks in the oppressive sun, the Israelites were introduced to this God “Yahweh,” the great “I Am,” who would make a free space for them. This deity would punish the oppressors who made them placeless and prepare a generous place for them where they could work and worship in freedom and flourishing. These slaves had done nothing to deserve this gift of divine hospitality. In fact, at several points, they do a great many things to reject Yahweh’s hospitality. And yet, despite their unfaithfulness and their ingratitude, a space flowing with milk and honey is prepared and graciously given to them.

In this new land, the people are commanded to remember this story of divine hospitality in a rather odd and unexpected way. The people of Israel 10

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are commanded to make generous space for foreigners, widows, orphans, and the poor as a memorial act honoring the divine hospitality shown to them in Egypt. This is what it means for them to walk in the ways of the Lord. As the Israelites engage in civic acts of hospitality, they rehearse the sacred memory that they too were once on the margins and that their God was hospitable to them. As a nation that had experienced the oppression of empire and the inhospitality of humanity, their political lives were meant to reflect the hospitable character of their divine spacemaker. Likewise, when the Israelites failed to show civic hospitality to those on the margins, they were guilty of forgetting—and dishonoring—their God and the memory of their God’s hospitality to them. This was not a private spirituality of hospitality: Israel’s collective legal, political, and civic life was to be marked by the memory of Yahweh’s holy hospitality.

The people of Israel are commanded to make generous space for foreigners, widows, orphans, and the poor as a memorial act honoring the divine hospitality shown to them in Egypt.

The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-­born.

Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. (Lev. 19:34)

And yet it was not to be: Israel failed to make generous and just civic space for the least of these. They failed to remember God’s hospitality to them in their political and civic behavior. The Old Testament prophets speak of orphans, widows, and the poor being crushed by Israel’s elite. Powerful economic, religious, and political leaders made no space for those on the margins. Small farmers were pushed off their ancestral lands. Foreigners, orphans, and widows were denied their public right to juridical protection.

The poor were denied shelter and left exposed to the vicissitudes of economic struggle. Ultimately, Israel forgot its national calling to honor the hospitality that God had shown them through their own civic life.

The biblical theme of hospitality continues throughout the life of Jesus and the New Testament story of the early church. From the very start of Christ’s birth narrative, the issue of hospitality, or lack thereof, shows up.

The long-­awaited Messiah arrives in the town of David, and what is Israel’s response? “We have no room for you.”

The hospitable life and teachings of Jesus are in profound continuity with the Old Testament commands to create space for others. When Jesus called his fellow Israelites to make generous space for those on the margins, he was, in essence, simply being a faithful Jew calling them back to their national vocation that had been given to them by God. That said, if we look closer, we see that Jesus is not simply repeating and repackaging the Old Testament ethic of hospitality—he’s radicalizing it.

Jesus begins to command generous hospitality not simply for those on the margins but for the enemy as well. Jesus commands hospitality not simply with one’s food but with one’s very body and life. We find this radical form of hospitality taught in the Sermon on the Mount. But we also find it embodied in a powerful way on the Mount of Olives. Here soldiers come with swords, clubs, and torches to take Jesus away to his death. Amid the fear and violence of the struggle, Jesus reaches out an unarmed hand to heal and restore a servant who sought to bind him. Here the marginalized servant is not meekly asking for help, he is violently seeking to destroy Jesus. And yet, still, hospitality is shown.

Moreover, in a stunning reversal, Christ comes uninvited as a humble Christian Educators Journal

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The long-­awaited ­Messiah arrives in the town of David, and what is Israel’s response? “We have no room for you.”

Jesus is not simply repeating and repackaging the Old Testament ethic of hospitality—he’s radicalizing it.

On the cross, once and for all, God’s arms are outstretched in costly welcome.

Like Jesus, students should be able to enter someone else’s political home to listen, learn, and enquire with political humility and care.

guest. Here the God of the universe asks others for a meal, for shelter, and for community. The Almighty stands at our door and knocks. In the life and teachings of Jesus we learn what it means to be a humble guest vulnerable and dependent on the hospitality of others.

Ultimately, Christ’s cross represents not simply the culmination of Christ’s teachings about radical hospitality; it represents the consummation of God’s mission of hospitality begun in the garden. There on Calvary, Christ “makes space” once again for all creation and all his creatures. This spacemaking endeavor on Golgotha is costly and gruesome. Here the hospitable God makes space for a creation who made no space for him. On the cross, once and for all, God’s arms are outstretched in costly welcome.

Like Israel before them, followers of Jesus are called to actively respond to Christ’s hospitality with a political hospitality of their own. To remember the hospitality of the cross is to imitate, image, and reflect the hospitality we have received in our political lives.

The witness of the early church amid the violence and domination of the Roman Empire was marked by a strange witness of hospitality. Women, children, minorities, widows, the poor, and the sick were not only given shelter, they were honored as sisters and brothers, baptized as holy saints, holy members of the body of Christ, the Lord and Savior. In Greco-­Roman culture, showing mercy, grace, and honor to the least of these was a mark of religious and political weakness; in the early church it was the mark of religious and political strength. The early church grew exponentially throughout the empire as it honored women, cared for unwanted children and the sick, included dominated tribes and nations, and shared a common table and purse.

What does this mean practically for a civics course in a Christian school?

I can offer a few final remarks that will hopefully enrich the pedagogical imaginations of other teachers more gifted than myself. First, students must learn to be a guest in the political lives of others. Like Jesus, they should be able to enter someone else’s political home to listen, learn, and enquire with political humility and care. Like Jesus they should be able to approach “political others” who have been shunned by their religious and political community. Those who have been marked as unclean, unworthy, and unsafe.

To be a political guest is to enter into someone else’s political story and pain, not out of moral weakness, relativism, or lack of conviction, but out of love and grace. Jesus did not compromise his religious-­political holiness when he encountered the centurion, the tax collector, the prostitute, or the Samaritan; his holiness was on display as he came near, listened, ate, touched, and healed. As a guest, he managed to show hospitality.

Finally, like the people of Israel before them, a civics student must learn that they should show political hospitality to other citizens as a way of honoring and remembering the hospitality that was shown to them. The cross of Jesus Christ has political implications for our civic posture. If we fail to create generous civic space for others in our political imaginations, if we fail to open our political arms, we fail to remember and honor the nail-­pierced arms that made space for us.

Dr. Matthew Kaemingk teaches Christian ethics and public theology at Fuller Seminary where he serves as the Richard John Mouw Associate Professor of Faith and Public Life.

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Civic Hospitality and the Challenges of/to Pluralism KEVIN R. den DULK

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early a decade ago, my university and our sibling seminary took an unconventional path to a prison-­education program. We could have focused on learners who would parole soon with the goal of reducing recidivism rates by helping incarcerated persons re-­enter broader society well.

We also could have built a curriculum that would inculcate the technical and “soft” skills that prepare re-­entering citizens for the challenges of the workforce and the broader culture. These are the typical elements of a prison-­ education program that win the support of departments of corrections, state legislators, foundations, and employers. But our university-­seminary partnership started with a counter-­cultural line of thinking: What if we built our efforts around those with life sentences and others with a long road to parole, that is, those most unlikely to re-­enter society any time soon? And what if our curriculum was designed less to foster skills for re-­entry and more to cultivate a deep community within the prison itself?

Our answers to those questions resulted in the Calvin Prison Initiative (CPI), a national gem in prison education that seeks transformation within prisons through a degree program that fosters moral community exclusively among the long-­term incarcerated. CPI boldly declares that God’s image bearers are created for each other—and that our communal selves are not checked at a prison gate. CPI also declares, equally boldly, that community is possible even amid profound diversity—in fact, that communities of inquiry will thrive in diverse places. There is no mistaking or escaping the powerful differences among students, faculty, and staff on CPI’s prison campus. But a hallmark of the program is to practice habits and form dispositions that help us navigate our differences as a necessary feature of living in common.

CPI boldly declares that God’s image bearers are created for each other— and that our communal selves are not checked at a prison gate.

Democracy, Difference, and Civic Education As a political scientist, I have always seen CPI as an encouraging glimpse into what we might hope for for civic life on the outside of the prison’s walls.

And what a contrast outside those walls. Modern democracy seems tormented by difference. We not only find little to agree on about human sexuality, immigration, race and policing, or other hot button issues of the day, but we also distrust the institutions that are supposed to help us forge a life in common. The irony is that we widely share that institutional skepticism but can’t agree on the reasons. Electoral integrity? Judicial bias? A failure of law and order? Money in politics? There are plenty of reasons to join the chorus of distrust.

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We distrust the institutions that are supposed to help us forge a life in common. The irony is that we widely share that institutional skepticism but can’t agree on the reasons.

After all, the easiest way to tolerate is to avoid what we find objectionable and sort ourselves into networks of sameness.

Unlike the merely tolerant, hospitable citizens do not give in to the temptation of self-­segregation.

In a sense, these are not unexpected patterns in our politics (even if their recent intensity can be surprising). We might argue they are baked into democracy itself. The tension between diversity and solidarity has always been a key challenge of modern democratic life. We cannot establish a measure of common ground—a promise of democracy—without a willingness to engage others across the lines of our differences. Yet those differences, and the social environments that shape those differences, matter to our sense of meaning, purpose, and community. When a democracy asks its citizens to set aside or reimagine differences and seek common purposes, it pushes against deep social inheritances that are often fundamental to identity itself.

A classically liberal democratic answer to this tension is a thin framework of process and rights rooted in tolerance. Tolerance is a straightforward rational calculation: I will put up with those ideas and persons I find objectionable if others extend the same restraint to me. For scholars from John Locke to John Inazu, this “modest unity”—to use Inazu’s (2016) phrase—around tolerance not only reflects some basic assumptions about human freedom and action, but is also worth embracing for the simple reason that both liberal citizens and liberal democracies appear to resort to violence less often than alternative systems.

Still, a pulse-­check of liberal democracies across the globe raises the question of whether tolerance is enough. Political distrust, deep-­seated polarization, and destabilizing populism have besieged liberal democracies across North America, Europe, and elsewhere (Carothers and O’Donohue 2019; Galston 2018; Mounk 2018). Citizens are wondering about the health of long-­standing public institutions. One could argue those trends are evidence of the need for reinvigorated tolerance, an openness to peaceful co-­ existence. But perhaps tolerance is part of the problem. After all, the easiest way to tolerate is to avoid what we find objectionable and sort ourselves into networks of sameness. Self-­segregation is no pathway to realizing common ground.

What I see in CPI is a virtue beyond tolerance, a kind of hospitality that carves out public spaces that take pluralism seriously, even in a prison. We often associate hospitality with the intimacy of family and friends and of spaces such as the home. But the experience of the learners in prison pushes us to ask, what if we extended the idea of hospitality outside these groups— even to strangers—and into the broader public square? The difference this makes is profound.

Unlike the merely tolerant, hospitable citizens do not give in to the temptation of self-­segregation. As Matthew Kaemingk (2018) shows us in his work on Christian-­Muslim relations, hospitable citizens cultivate habits of patience and generosity, especially toward the stranger or otherwise disadvantaged, with a goal of actively creating public space to engage each other in our differences. Christians might unexpectedly recognize the fruit of the Spirit in the concept. What if we cultivated a civic peace, forbearance, kindness, gentleness, self-­control—even a civic love and joy?

This distinctively civic hospitality is a habit and a disposition that we form, not merely a belief that we hold. Here the formative power of institutions, including schools, is crucial. It is my contention that educators have a great deal of work to do in expanding from the familiar focus of schools on civic knowledge (“How many branches of government?”) or skills (“How should a citizen prepare to vote?”) to developing the dispositions that citizens 14

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need in order to take part fully in public life. And that raises another key question: How might Christian civic educators cultivate curriculum and pedagogy that sustain hospitality in public life toward those who are different from us?

How might Christian civic educators cultivate curriculum and pedagogy that sustain hospitality

The Challenges to/of Pluralism

in public life toward

We live in a time when answering that question is both more urgent and more challenging than ever before. Consider, for example, our recent experience of trust, that key ingredient to civic decision-­making in a democracy.

Trust in public institutions is in alarming decline across many democratic countries. Confidence in nearly every institution in civil society in most Western democracies has eroded over the past four decades. One of the few institutions that has maintained high levels of support is the military (Jones 2022)—a revealing fact, given its coercive capacity to offer security in an era of disorientation and fear.

In addition to distrust in institutions, our levels of trust in each other—“interpersonal” or “social” trust, that is, trust in friends, family, co-­ workers, co-­religionists—has also declined. As trust wanes, people participate less and democracy diminishes. After all, if our fellow citizens or our institutions are unreliable partners, then there’s little point in agreeing to work together on public matters.

I would suggest that declining trust manifests itself in at least two key directions in our body politic. One direction is polarization; the other is alienation.

While we have had separate “poles” in our politics in the past, today’s polarization does not seem run-­of-­the-­mill. The difference is that polarization today is affective (Iyengar and Westwood 2015), or, to use a common shorthand, tribal. What I mean is that the most important features of our deep political divides are not ideology or policy preferences—progressive versus conservative, differences over labor or immigration or taxation or abortion. Our political climate has far more to do with our intense emotional—our affective—identification with partisan groups. And the way we identify with those groups is not simply about loyalty to groups, in the way we might be loyal to, say, a sports team. It turns out that partisans are often not entirely sure what to make of their own groups; they identify with them, but most partisans are not strongly emotionally invested in what they claim as their “in-­groups,” especially when compared to the strength of those associations in the past.

Those partisans are, however, open about their outright contempt—not disagreement, but contempt—for the opposition. Cross-­partisan antipathies have soared in the past three decades (Pew Research Center 2019). Social scientists have fielded surveys and experiments in which citizens are tested about their feelings toward all types of out-­groups, that is, groups a person doesn’t belong to. And today partisan out-­groups get the rock-­bottom evaluations, far worse than other out-­groups based on class, religion, or even race. Opposed partisans are simply derided, feared. We don’t merely see others across the political divide as wrongheaded; they are morally suspect, dangerous, a threat to community itself.

And affective polarization isn’t limited to a domain of what we

from us?

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those who are different

We don’t merely see others across the political divide as wrongheaded; they are morally suspect, dangerous, a threat to community itself.

conventionally understand as politics: social scientists have found this tribal thinking seeping into “non-­political” areas of life (Margolis 2018), including choices about where to live, what media to consume, whom to marry, how to parent a child, even where you get your coffee. Readers might recognize this pattern of political tribalism in their experience of social media, where we unfriend and unfollow because politics has hit too close to home.

That leads us to that other manifestation of distrust: alienation. Robert Putnam (2007), a Harvard political scientist and well-­known dean of trust scholars, reminds us that citizens might have low levels of trust that prevent them from bridging to others—they might find members of out-­groups morally reprehensible and threats to the republic—without having a high bond of trust with an in-­group. I might identify with members of my church or my workplace—my in-­groups—but still distrust everyone, regardless of their group status, “in” or “out.”

This is perhaps the most overlooked challenge to democratic citizenship today: widespread social isolation and loneliness. The reasons for that isolation are not always comfortable to discuss. Nor is the social science entirely clear in its message. But it is sufficiently compelling that it deserves our attention. In fact, as Putnam explains, it is possible that our exposure to diversity itself contributes to widespread social isolation and disaffection, partly because a bewildering range of competing perspectives can paralyze even the most discerning citizens, leading them to “hunker down” and disengage.

Thinking Christianly about Civic Education

Christian civic educators should never see themselves as playing the neutral referee in a game of civic learning.

Christians could fall prey to one tempting response to the neutrality myth through triumphalism.

Our predominant models for civic learning are not up to the dual challenge of polarization and disaffection.

States and national governments have some standard ways of prioritizing civic learning, as evidenced in their typical measurements of civic learning (see, e.g., NAEP 2024). Those measures tend to focus on civic knowledge (a basic understanding of political structures and values) or civic skills (the capacities of leadership, discernment, and communication necessary to act responsibly in the public sphere). Quite often the pedagogies that emphasize knowledge and skills smuggle in an implied claim of neutrality. The student is equipped with some facts and capacities, but what the student does with those resources is none of the educator’s business.

But in reality, of course, the educator chooses to highlight certain facts and dispositions, and those choices are not neutral (for an extensive critique and hopeful alternative, see Boyte 2018). Christian civic educators should never see themselves as playing the neutral referee in a game of civic learning. That is especially the case if a goal of civic learning moves beyond facts and skills to the formation of habits and dispositions that foster collective decision-­making across lines of difference. We have profound formative choices to make, not least of which is whether to follow the road of celebrating tolerance as the sine qua non of liberal democracy, despite its thin anthropology and tendency toward self-­segregation.

Christians could fall prey to one tempting response to the neutrality myth through triumphalism. In terms of civic learning, it usually takes the form of insisting that a properly Christian education in citizenship and politics can and must yield the one right way to think about public life. A 16

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corollary is that there is little value in hearing the other side when you know you must be right. The focus is often on bedrock values and sometimes on tendentious interpretations of the past that conveniently place history on one’s own side. Those interpretations too often swerve into a nationalism that is hard to distinguish from idolatry.

A second temptation goes in the opposite direction: avoidance. The idea here is that Christian education is no place for education in citizenship; we ought to get out and stay out of the political swamp. There are countless reasons for wanting to do so, not least of which is how dangerous power can be for the soul. Besides, Christians often assume that non-­educational institutions—for example, churches, families—are the primary seedbeds of good citizenship. Leave schools out of it, or at least focus schools merely on apparently simple facts about historical events (“War XYZ was fought from . . . ”) or institutional structures (“legislatures make laws; executives administer laws; courts adjudicate laws”).

I would respond to these two temptations by both affirming the civic mission of schools and focusing on pedagogies that take community-­ in‑difference seriously.

To be sure, schools are not the sole space for citizen formation, nor ought they be. The church, when it takes faithful discipleship seriously—indeed, even when it doesn’t take it seriously—cultivates capacities and dispositions that matter to citizenship. Other civil-­society associations do as well.

Yet formal education through schools is not merely a fact of modern life, but in democratic settings, schools have developed a distinctive civic purpose in connecting knowledge, skills, and dispositions at key developmental moments. What’s more, Christian schools, in my view, should always address the full person in the form of a learner. The full person includes what those CPI students know deeply: that we are created for community, even in our differences and despite our conflicts over those differences.

And that brings me back to civic hospitality. If we are not called to use facts and skills to whatever purpose our self-­interests might suggest, and if we are called to embrace community without discarding conviction, then we must go beyond tolerance to a posture of hospitality. We need not agree with everyone at the civic table, but neither should we sit at the end of the table and refuse to pay attention to everyone who joins us there. Civic hospitality calls us to live in that tension between a generosity that opens the table wide precisely because we are committed disciples of Christ. Discipleship is not threatened by civic hospitality; it is the reason for it.

Works Cited Boyte, Harry. Awakening Democracy through Public Work: Pedagogies of Empowerment. Vanderbilt UP, 2018.

Carothers, Thomas, and Andrew O’Donohue. Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization. Brookings, 2019.

Galston, William A. Anti-­Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy.

Yale UP, 2018.

Inazu, John. Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Iyengar, Shanto, and Sean J. Westwood. “Fear and Loathing across Party Christian Educators Journal

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A second temptation goes in the opposite direction: avoidance.

We need not agree with everyone at the civic table, but neither should we sit at the end of the table and refuse to pay attention to everyone who joins us there.

Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization.” American Journal of Political Science, vol. 59, no. 3, 2015, pp. 690–707.

Jones, Jeffrey M. “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at a New Low.” Gallup, 5 July 2022, news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-­ institutions-­down-­average-­new-­low.aspx. Accessed 24 July 2023.

Kaemingk, Matthew. Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear. Eerdmans, 2018.

Margolis, Michelle F. From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Mounk, Yascha. The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. Harvard UP, 2018.

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). “Civics,” nces.ed.gov/ nationsreportcard/civics/. Accessed 24 July 2023.

Pew Research Center. “Partisan Antipathy: More Intense, More Personal,” 10 Oct. 2019, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/10/10/partisan​-­antip athy-­more-­intense-­more-­personal/. Accessed 25 July 2023.

Putnam, Robert D. “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-­First Century.” Scandinavian Political Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2007, pp. 137–74.

Kevin R. den Dulk is Associate Provost at Calvin University. He has co-­authored or co-­edited several books, including The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Six Democracies, Religion and Politics in America, and Pews, Prayers, and Participation.

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Hospitality, Politics, and Human Nature MICAH WATSON

Thinking about how to better prepare our students and future citizens now for the political storms coming next year may feel a bit like planting trees in May to give us shade in July. But we have to start somewhere.

W

hile there is still a little over a year before the formal election day takes place in November 2024 for American voters, we can already feel the approaching political season heating up. For many of us, this may trigger a knot of anxiety in our stomachs and call to mind previous election controversies and political conflicts, tense Thanksgiving Day family conversations, and awkward-­to-­ugly interactions on social media. Thinking about how to better prepare our students and future citizens now for the political storms coming next year may feel a bit like planting trees in May to give us shade in July. But we have to start somewhere, and there will be many more hot Julys to come. In what follows, I describe four insights that help explain the importance of Christian civic hospitality and why we should practice it such that it becomes an ingrained virtue for us as individuals and groups.

Perennial Disagreement

For Christians, the political debates and divides go back to the very beginning of our faith.

On this side of eternity, we will always wrestle with how to live together, and we will never completely get it right.

First, while it feels like the last few years have been rather rough on the civility front, differences, disagreements, and polarization are not new, nor are they going away. As the smash hit musical Hamilton reminds us, it was only a few years into the American political experiment that a sitting vice president shot and killed the country’s first treasury secretary. For Christians, the political debates and divides go back to the very beginning of our faith. Jesus did teach that we are to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God (Mark 12:13–17), and Paul and Peter instruct us to honor political authorities (Rom. 13; 1 Pet. 2:17). At the same time, we know our citizenship in God’s kingdom far outweighs any claims from merely human authorities. We long for a “better country—a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:16), and if human authorities demand that we compromise our faith, like the apostles, we “must obey God rather than human beings” (Acts 5:29). Christians have been wrestling with how to engage the political for well for over two thousand years, sometimes as a minority amid a dominant non-­Christian culture, other times as the majority, and at still other times somewhere in between.

Politics is inevitably about how different people live well together, but given human finitude (our knowledge is limited) and human fallenness (we are selfish by nature), we don’t always agree on what living well together looks like. Even when we do agree, we have a hard time doing it. On this side of eternity, we will always wrestle with how to live together, and we will never completely get it right. In fact, this reality is what makes civic hospitality so necessary. One perennial temptation in the face of stubborn 22

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differences is to fence off our common living space from those who are different. Christian hospitality makes possible a different posture by acknowledging genuine (and at times difficult!) differences but equipping us to make space for others, following the God who in his grace has made space for us.

Commonality and Difference Second, Christians should acknowledge the sometimes perplexing dynamic of our fundamental commonality with our neighbors who don’t share our faith and the radical differences between us. Simply, as human beings we have a common nature insofar as God has created all of us in his image.

There are many shared goods—think sanitation, education, nutrition, security—that every human being needs in order to flourish and that every political order should provide or make possible. At the same time, as Christians, we are citizens first of a different kingdom (Heb. 11:14–16), a “chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Pet. 2:9). Some of our beliefs and practices will, and should, raise eyebrows, though hopefully for good reasons rather than bad (Matt. 5:16). This combination of commonality and difference makes sharing our common spaces both challenging and rewarding. It is challenging because we must work to charitably understand where others are coming from while living out the particular callings we have as Christians. God’s call for us to extend hospitality to others is a specifically Christian duty to love others beyond the more comfortable confines of our Christian community. In this way, hospitality is a sort of bridge between the particular (Christian) and the common (all human beings as image bearers).

We must work to charitably understand where others are coming from while living out the particular callings we have as Christians.

Rational, Emotional, and Relational Human Nature Third, our human nature matters for how we learn. As human beings we are rational creatures. But we are not just that. We are also emotional creatures, for whom the heart matters as well as the head. While we have all met people who may lean more toward one of those distinctives than the other, we are both thinking and feeling creatures. We are also relational beings, meant to live and learn in community. We Christians know that from the witness of Scripture. “It is not good for the man to be alone,” God declares in Genesis 2:18. But one can know this even apart from Scripture, as we see in the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s reminder that we are social creatures equipped with the capacity to speak and reason about the good life. Too often we can emphasize one of these features and neglect the importance of another. In doing so, we undermine the education we need to become more virtuous—in this case, learning to acquire the virtue of civic hospitality.

Why does undermining one feature of our nature make learning virtue harder? Our rational, emotional, and relational nature means we need both “head” knowledge and “heart” practice, and we need to acquire both with other people, with fellow students and wise teachers. You do not learn how to drive a car just by reading the instruction manual. It will help to study the principles of safe driving and to cognitively understand how the gas and Christian Educators Journal

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We are both thinking and feeling creatures. We are also relational beings, meant to live and learn in community.

We can read all sorts of descriptions of hospitality and reasons why we should practice it with our neighbors, but unless we get behind the wheel, so to speak, we will not become hospitable.

brake pedals work, but you won’t truly acquire the virtues of a good driver (i.e., become a good driver) without feeling your way through the challenges of actually driving the car, ideally with a seasoned and patient instructor sitting alongside you in the passenger seat. Becoming a hospitable person (or church, or school) is similar. We can read all sorts of descriptions of hospitality and reasons why we should practice it with our neighbors, but unless we get behind the wheel, so to speak, we will not become hospitable.

And yet answering that call from God to practice hospitality means risking encounters that can be difficult and even uncomfortable. This is why the curriculum of the Civic Hospitality Project (see the editorial for details) includes a variety of sources and practices, all meant to be engaged under the tutelage of Christian educators. Finally on this third insight, there is no non-­learning option. Just as political differences will always be with us, so will we always be shaped or molded in some fashion with regard to if and how we extend hospitality to others. It is not a matter of whether we will learn how to engage difference in our shared public square but how well or poorly. A quick perusal of our civic discourse in the last few years, online and in person, testifies to this reality, and we have cause to be concerned.

Giving and Receiving Hospitality

One possible liability that accompanies pursuing hospitality is a mindset that sees us (our group, our kind) as the hosts in any setting.

As we make space for others, we take a risk by being open to others who can make space for us.

Fourth and finally, while we should continually aspire to practice hospitality as a virtue, that is, to be hospitable, the role hospitality plays in our particular relationships with others should not be static. One possible liability that accompanies pursuing hospitality is a mindset that sees us (our group, our kind) as the hosts in any setting and particularly in the public square.

That is to say that we can see ourselves as the generous actors who are in the privileged position of being able to reach out to others. This is not a bad thing in itself, of course, but it can be rather satisfying and may become problematic if we ourselves are not open to receiving others’ hospitality.

In the theological sense, God’s hospitality is qualitatively different from ours. We will never be on his “level,” and thus when God makes space for us, he will always be graciously engaging us out of his abundance. While we can speak of our “making space” for God in our lives, he certainly does not need it. We certainly do. And so our extending hospitality to each other, particularly in the political realm or public square, is different. It is true we are called to make space for those who are different from us, and the truly different are often those who are in the most need of their neighbors’ hospitality. But because we are persuaded that it is good for us as Christians and human beings to practice hospitality, it must also be good for our neighbors to whom we are hospitable to have the opportunity to practice hospitality.

And this means we should think and act toward the goal, as much as is possible, of a mutual hospitality, such that as we make space for others, we take a risk by being open to others who can make space for us. What this may mean for teaching our students is focusing on not only what it means to be good hosts but also what it means to be good guests.

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Conclusion These observations are hardly exhaustive. We could come up with more insights and principles that should frame our calling to Christian hospitality and formative Christian education. And Christian hospitality is not a silver bullet solution for the nastiness that plagues our national discourse.

Nevertheless, these insights are a good place to start. We do well to recognize that political difference and pluralism are a permanent feature of our lives but also that as Christians we share important commonalities with our non-­Christian neighbors. Becoming the sort of people God calls us to be-­—virtuous, godly, loving, hospitable—means structuring our teaching and learning so as to reflect our rational, emotional, and relational nature.

And we should hope that our hospitality extended to those unlike ourselves can mature into mutually hospitable relationships, such that we can both give and receive the social and even spiritual goods made possible by God’s gracious hospitality extended toward us.

Micah Watson is Paul Henry Professor of Christianity and Politics at Calvin University where he directs the Henry Institute and teaches political science. He and his wife, Julie, make their home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with their five children.

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Hospitality and Schools: Four Lenses DAVID I. SMITH

I

f we want to think about hospitality and schools, we might be tempted to go straight to questions of personal warmth. We might think about how welcoming our spaces are for students and parents, or the tone of the reception that we provide to visitors. These are not bad things to think about.

Yet there is more to the relationship between hospitality and schooling than gestures and attitudes. In this essay, I will outline four additional lenses for thinking about how our schools might be related to Jesus’s call to welcome strangers. I will look briefly in turn at how hospitality is connected to the nature of schooling, to curriculum content, to the way we teach, and to learning outcomes.

1. Schools as Places of Hospitality

In the Middle Ages, to teach was to shape a shared space in which learners found safety, sustenance, and a pattern of life together.

Let’s begin with schools themselves. In the late Middle Ages, in the early days of the first universities, students often lived in communal houses overseen by a master of the arts. Food, accommodation, and the rhythms of learning and communal life were provided in exchange for a fee. One name for such a house was the hospicium, or hospice (Schwinges 218). Before it became associated with end-­of-­life care in the nineteenth century, a hospice meant a rest house for travelers. The students were hospites, guests. Another name for the shared house was the paedagogium, a place of pedagogy. Teaching and hospitality are close neighbors here; schools, like hospices and hospitals, are places of hospitality. To teach was to shape a shared space in which learners found safety, sustenance, and a pattern of life together. To provide schooling was also to provide hospitality, a temporary but formative place to dwell during part of life’s journey.

Even when schooling is not residential, the idea that it might be a kind of hospitality lingers. Claudia Ruitenberg’s recent book on education and hospitality discusses Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the nature of education. Arendt (cited in Ruitenberg 4) writes: Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token to save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands the chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

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Arendt evokes two scenarios that are neither educational nor hospitable. We might abandon the young to their own projects, like potential guests left out on the street. Or we might crunch them through a tight script of required responses, like guests tied to their chairs and force-­fed our own favorite foods. Hospitality is not abandoning guests on a vacant lot, nor is it inviting them into our homes and dominating the conversation without regard for their needs. Schooling, Arendt suggests, involves making space for the young in two senses: making a cultural space that has a shape and texture that have been wrought with care, so that they do not have to begin from scratch, and making space for their own agency, so that they do not lose the chance to contribute. As Ruitenberg notes, that sounds a lot like hospitality.

There have been other images for schooling. We have sometimes imagined schools as printing presses imprinting knowledge on the young, or as factories turning out polished products, or as businesses providing services to clients. How might we do it if we instead imagined schools as agencies of hospitality?

Hospitality is not abandoning guests on a vacant lot, nor is it inviting them into our homes and dominating the conversation without regard for their needs.

2. Hospitality and Curriculum The idea of hospitality is not self-­explanatory. It can be twisted in various cultural directions. When hospitality becomes primarily a way of profiting from travelers, or a way of showing off our homemaking skills, or a way paying back to friends what they give to us, or a way of sustaining advantageous connections to our bosses, colleagues, or pastors, it becomes something other than what scriptural accounts of hospitality evoke. Explicit instruction about hospitality recurs in Christian preaching throughout the centuries, building on passages such as Leviticus 19 (“Love [the foreigner] as yourself,” v. 34), Matthew 25 (“I was a stranger and you invited me in,” v.

35), and Hebrews 13 (“Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers,” v. 2).

Christian leaders repeatedly address the reality of mixed motives. “Whoever receives the great, often does it from vainglory also,” warned John Chrysostom. “Surpass us in generosity,” he continued. “Have a room, to which Christ may come. Say, ‘This is Christ’s space. This building is set apart for Him.’ Even if it is just a basement and tiny. He won’t refuse it.”

Chrysostom anticipated protests from his congregation: what if the strangers are unworthy or ungrateful? Well, he says, then your reward in heaven will be greater. In the meantime, we should attend to our prejudices: “If you know indeed that they are impostors, don’t receive them into your house.

But if you don’t know this, why do you accuse them lightly?” (qtd. in Oden 61–62). John Calvin echoed the point: “Say, ‘He is contemptible and worthless’; but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he has deigned to give the beauty of his image. Say that you owe nothing for any service of his; but God, as it were, has put him in his own place in order that you may recognize toward him the many and great benefits with which God has bound you to himself ” (Calvin 3.7.6). Christian teachers across time have challenged the impulse to self-­righteousness and pointed believers back to the biblical emphasis on seeing in the face of the stranger a call to welcome.

There is also a history of detailed Christian reflection on the practicalities of hospitality, as Christine Pohl has detailed. A few strangers are a real Christian Educators Journal

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Explicit instruction about hospitality recurs in Christian preaching throughout the centuries.

Where in the curriculum might students learn to think carefully about hospitality, its practical challenges and creative community responses?

threat. Welcoming strangers in a public place, at the well in the center of the village, meant that ancient acts of hospitality were not hidden. This provided some protection for the hosts. A commitment to welcome all without distinction can quickly exhaust the emotional and material resources of a community, and we are not the first to wrestle with the challenge of drawing appropriate boundaries as we seek to serve. One early church manual recommended that a stranger should be welcomed but after two or three days could be expected to work for their sustenance (Choge). Current Christian scholars provide analysis of how Christian communities are dealing (or failing to deal) with diversity (e.g., Kaemingk) and careful discussions of how biblical treatments of hospitality relate to present-­day social needs (e.g., Jipp).

In other words, if we want to think well about Christian hospitality, we have more than hunches to work with. There are things to learn, matters to clarify, and resources available. There is a rich history of Christian reflection on hospitality. Might it benefit our students to learn about that history?

Where in the curriculum might they learn to think carefully about hospitality, its practical challenges and creative community responses? Where and how might students learn about societal conflicts through a lens of hospitality? If hospitality involves more than warm intentions, what might that imply for what we teach across the curriculum? It would be odd and counter-­ cultural to consider schools as fundamentally places of hospitality. Although we have never deemed the topic worthy of study, I suggest we should.

3. Hospitality and Pedagogy

If we begin to think of hospitality not just as a personal attitude, but as a practice, it can lead us into concrete reflections on our teaching choices.

If hospitality is part of our faith, a facet of what schools are, and a topic ripe for study, inconsistency and hypocrisy beckon if our teaching practices are not themselves hospitable. Henri Nouwen suggests that “students are not just the poor, needy, ignorant beggars who come to the man or woman of knowledge, but they are . . . indeed like guests who honor the house with their visit and will not leave without having made their own contribution” (196). Notice how even this brief comment suggests an orientation to teaching that looks for ways to honor students’ contributions to the learning conversation. Some recent research in Norwegian Christian schools asked students what teacher behaviors counted as caring for them. The most common answers focused on the experience of being heard, being genuinely listened to, being taken seriously, and feeling known by the teacher (Ystebø). A hospitable stance has a great deal to contribute to good teaching.

If we begin to think of hospitality not just as a personal attitude, but as a practice, it can lead us into concrete reflections on our teaching choices. I spent many years reflecting on the implications of the practice of hospitality to strangers for the world language classroom (Smith and Carvill). It led me to question the topics that we used for language practice: what if instead of shopping, travel, and hobbies (talking about ourselves and getting others to give us things), we intentionally learned to listen to the stories of others, including the marginal and the elderly? It led me to think about how I framed learning: what if, instead of always talking about learning to speak a second language, we talked about learning to hear a second language, gaining the skill of listening to people whose words until now have been closed 28

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to us? It led me to question the visual landscape of my course: what if, instead of cartoon pictures of foreigners taking vacations or awkward stock photos, we worked from real family photos that let speakers of other languages be represented as more human? I repeatedly found that reflecting on the practice of hospitality led me to concrete changes in the way I taught my subject area. Such questions multiply across the curriculum. How do my teaching practices make space, for instance, for students with diverse cognitive abilities, diverse identities, diverse backgrounds? The more we attend to a hospitable process, the more plausible hospitality is likely to seem when addressed as a topic.

4. Hospitality and Learning Outcomes A student who learns to think more clearly about hospitality and experiences hospitable teaching still falls short of the biblical vision if they do not begin to themselves develop the skills and dispositions needed to practice hospitality. Everything said so far invites this last step: what if we think about the capacity for hospitality to strangers as a concrete learning outcome that we want to see in our graduates, one that results from intentional learning? We might then have to think about which areas of the curriculum can contribute, and how, and how those contributions might be woven together. We would have to break down the idea of hospitality into some of its component skills (the capacity, for instance, to defer self-­gratification, to listen well to others, to be slow to judge, to listen to more than one side of a story, to make space for others). We would also have to consider what kinds of learning experiences only lead to knowledge about hospitality and what kinds have a chance of working on students’ dispositions and skills.

None of this is a simple matter, but reflecting on it can be fruitful. The challenge of addressing student habits and dispositions was a recurring theme in team discussions during the Civic Hospitality Project (see this issue’s editorial for more details on the project). It was this emphasis that led us to design lessons that engaged students experientially in discovering their own biases and their ways of hearing others’ stories, in making decisions together and then stepping back to consider how those decisions were made, or in planning and conducting a hospitable interview. You can explore these and other examples in detail at civichospitality.com.

Conclusion Returning to where we started, the interpersonal tone of a school surely matters. It matters whether visitors feel welcome in the reception area, whether students feel welcomed by their teachers, whether the facilities are a hospitable space. But relating Christian hospitality to education calls us to more than interpersonal warmth. It calls us to reflect on what school is and what is worth including in the curriculum. It calls us to revisit our teaching practices and to think hard about the learning outcomes that we pursue. In none of this are we the first to attend to the matter. There is a rich heritage of Christian reflection on hospitality that can inform our efforts and that we can pass on if we choose to. Progress seems most likely if we Christian Educators Journal

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We would have to break down the idea of hospitality into some of its component skills (the capacity, for instance, to defer self-­gratification, to listen well to others, to be slow to judge, to listen to more than one side of a story, to make space for others).

connect these various facets together, keeping all of the lenses in play as we seek glimpses of wholeness.

Works Cited Calvin, John. Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, edited by John T. McNeill, translated by Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster.

Choge, Emily J. “Hospitality in Africa.” Africa Bible Commentary, edited by Tokunboh Adeyemo, Zondervan Academic, 2010, p. 390.

Jipp, Joshua W. Saved by Faith and Hospitality. Eerdmans, 2017.

Kaemingk, Matthew. Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear. Eerdmans, 2018.

Nouwen, Henri. Reaching Out: Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. Image, 1986.

Oden, Amy G. And You Welcomed Me: A Sourcebook on Hospitality in Early Christianity. Abingdon, 2001.

Pohl, Christine D. Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition. Eerdmans, 1999.

Ruitenberg, Claudia W. Unlocking the World: Education in an Ethic of Hospitality. Routledge, 2015.

Schwinges, Rainer Christoph. “Student Education, Student Life.” Universities in the Middle Ages, edited by Hilde De Ridder-­Symoens, Cambridge UP, 1992, pp. 195–243.

Smith, David I., and Barbara Carvill. The Gift of the Stranger: Faith, Hospitality, and Foreign Language Learning. Eerdmans, 2000.

Ystebø, Asle. Ser du meg? Bryr du deg? Kjærlighet i profesjonelle pedagogiske relasjoner. Masters Thesis, NLA Høgskolen, Bergen, 2022.

David I. Smith is director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning, coordinator of the de Vries Institute for Global Faculty Development, and professor of education at Calvin University. He is editor of the International Journal of Christianity and Education.

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Herman Who? Hermeneutics, Hospitality, and the Bible Classroom MARK VANDERWERF

“I don’t like the apostle Paul.”

T

he assertion came after reading a particularly thorny and hard-­hitting passage from one of Paul’s epistles. Scanning the room, I could see shocked expressions on a few students’ faces, as if to ask, “Is he allowed to say that in Bible class?” Other students gave concerned glances in my direction that urged me: “You better set him straight, Mr. VanderWerf.” But others subtly nodded their heads with tentative agreement silently suggesting: “We have some questions about what Paul is saying here, too.”

I knew my response was likely going to set the tone for the rest of the class, perhaps even the semester.

“Tell me more,” I said. “Why do you think that?”

I listened to the student’s concerns, and the student, in turn, listened to me as I tried to explain some of the historic and cultural background that may have shaped Paul’s statements. By the end of our discussion, I asked the class how the conversation would have been different if the apostle Paul could have joined us in person over a shared meal. The class agreed: we all would have been more gracious, more curious, more kind, more understanding—in a word, more hospitable. To celebrate the unplanned moment of classroom discovery, we pledged to have a “Pauline Potluck.” The students all brought food to share and I role-­played the character of Paul. We ate, we laughed, and we learned a bit more about Paul, and I hope we learned a bit more about being hospitable.

This brief anecdote from my classroom illustrates two interconnected learning goals that I have for all of my Bible classes: to develop skills of hermeneutics and to practice hospitality. In this essay, I want to share how these two important concepts are related and give examples of what this could look like from my own classroom experience and from my work with the Civic Hospitality Project (see editorial for more details).

Hermeneutics and Hospitality “Herman who?” That’s how some of my students respond when they first hear the technical term hermeneutics. But hermeneutics, put simply, is the “science and art of biblical interpretation” (Virkler 16). Reading, understanding, and applying the Bible can be challenging. Some verses appear crystal clear: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Other passages, however, are trickier: “If anyone comes to me and does Christian Educators Journal

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There are two interconnected learning goals that I have for all of my Bible classes: to develop skills of hermeneutics and to practice hospitality.

Hermeneutics helps the Bible reader pay attention to the historical, cultural, linguistic, and literary backgrounds of a text in order to better understand what the text meant when it was originally written and how the text can be applied in our particular context.

The assignment is designed to get students to extend the practice of hermeneutics to interactions that they have with adults in their lives.

not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Even the crystal-­clear passages are often more multifaceted than we see at first glance. What does it suggest that the Greek word for “world” in John 3:16 is “cosmos”? What does that suggest about who or what is the object of God’s love? How did first-­century Jews understand the concept of eternal life?

Good Bible reading requires a good deal of curiosity.

Hermeneutics helps the Bible reader pay attention to the historical, cultural, linguistic, and literary backgrounds of a text in order to better understand what the text meant when it was originally written and how the text can be applied in our particular context. When it is done well, hermeneutics doesn’t explain away difficult Bible passages or simply dismiss hard teachings when they contradict our cultural norms, but it helps us understand why a text says what it does.

This is what I want all of my students to learn while in my Bible classes. I want them to be curious about the biblical text. I want them to ask questions of the text to better understand it, and when they come across challenging passages, I don’t want them to simply explain it away or dismiss it if they don’t particularly like it. I want them to do this because I want them to be good at hermeneutics, but I also want them to be good humans—and that requires hospitality.

So how does hermeneutics relate to hospitality?

Just as the practice of hermeneutics helps my students be curious about the biblical text, it can also help them be curious about the people all around them. The theologian Anthony Thiselton contends that hermeneutics is applicable to more than just Bible reading; it helps us become better people. Summarizing the Italian legal scholar Emilio Betti, Thiselton writes: “Hermeneutics teaches patience, tolerance, respect for other views, understanding, and humility, while holding one’s own views with firmness and generosity” (Thiselton i–ii). In many ways, this is what hospitality is all about: a willingness to love, engage, and make room for “the other,” whether we agree with a person or not.

An example of what this can look like came from my tenth-­grade New Testament class. One of my Bible teacher colleagues and I developed an assignment we called “Everyday Hermeneutics.” The assignment is designed to get students to extend the practice of hermeneutics to interactions that they have with adults in their lives—with whom they may have some occasional conflicts or differing views. The students’ task is to interview an “older” person (parent, grandparent, pastor, teacher, etc.) for the purpose of understanding that person’s cultural, geographic, and historical background. Students ask questions like: Where did you grow up, and how might that have shaped your perspective on life?

When did you grow up? What were some significant events that happened during that time? How do you think that time period affected you?

How have race and race relations played a part in your life?

How has the political climate changed during your lifetime? How has that affected you?

When did faith become an important part of your life?

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Like good hermeneutics, the goal for this assignment isn’t just to get some background information on a person in their life. The goal is to better understand who that person is and why they are the way they are. Many times, the responses my colleague and I get from this activity are unsurprising, but occasionally we receive emails or comments from parents expressing their gratitude for the opportunity to reconnect with their child through meaningful conversations.

Another example of the interplay of hermeneutics and hospitality comes from an activity from the Civic Hospitality Project that I incorporated into an upper-­level Bible class. The lesson is called “Jesus at the Table.” As a class, we spent a class period slowly reading and discussing the numerous situations where Jesus shared a meal with others. We noted the setting of the meal, who was present around the table (and who wasn’t), what conflicts arose at the dinner table, and how Jesus responded. In one story, we noticed that Jesus was invited to a party with tax collectors and sinners; in another, he is hosted by two women and engages them in theological discussion; and in another, he comes alongside two disciples deep in despair and grief. As we discussed these stories as a class, we noticed that Jesus seemed to ask a lot of questions and spent time with people whom others often neglected— and for that he was often criticized.

As a follow-­up assignment to this exercise, students were to conduct a political interview with someone with whom they might have significant differences, but do so in ways that reflected that spirit and pattern that they had seen lived out by Jesus. The goals for the assignment were as follows: to better understand the interviewee’s perspective and why they hold it to ask good questions and listen well to the answers to leave the interviewee feeling that they were heard and that the student was hospitable to improve the student’s skills in approaching others with intentional hospitality When the students received the assignment, there were certainly some groans in the classroom and at least one comment that went something like, “Mr. VanderWerf, this is not going to go very well. We’re all going to get into fights.”

But when the interviews were over, the responses were different. At the worst, some student responses were a shrug of the shoulders: “It went fine.

We still disagree, but it was okay.” A few, however, came back with responses like, “I had no idea why my mom is so passionate about racial reconciliation.

It makes a lot more sense now why we go to the church that we do.”

When students leave my Bible class, I want them to know the importance of hermeneutics—the need and value of patiently and carefully trying to understand not just what the Bible teaches, but why it says what it does.

But I want them to be more than just a good hermeneut; I want them to be hospitable. I want them to be good humans. Richard Mouw summarizes these convictions nicely: Christian people need a strong sense of curiosity. This is God’s world, and we ought to want to understand it better. And since human beings are such an important part of the divine scheme—“fearfully and wonderfully made” Christian Educators Journal

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As we discussed these stories as a class, we noticed that Jesus seemed to ask a lot of questions and spent time with ­people whom others often neglected—and for that he was often criticized.

(Psalm 139:14)—we ought to be very curious about the full range of human experience. We want to learn about people who are very different from ourselves. . . . We ought to want to know what makes our fellow citizens tick, why they think and act the way they do, how they have formed their deepest loves and loyalties. To learn civility in the public square is one important way to satisfy a healthy curiosity about what is “genuinely human.”

(60)

“We ought to want to know what makes our fellow citizens tick, why they think and act the way they do, how they have formed their deepest loves and loyalties.”

This is the world of the first century, and it sounds a lot like the polarization of our twenty-­ first-century world.

Paul and the Patterns of This World I began this essay describing one of my student’s distaste for the apostle Paul, but I like the prickly apostle. I think if we took the time to do a little hermeneutics to understand the world of the apostle Paul, we would be a bit more hospitable toward the man, and in turn, he would teach us all a bit about hospitality. Paul knew a world marked by deep division: political oppression, economic disparity, sexual exploitation and promiscuity, ethnic divisions, and religious in-­fighting. He wasn’t just an observer of this world, he was often the victim of its harshest realities. He was accused of distorting and misrepresenting the gospel from his fellow Christians, he was beaten by religious opponents, and he was imprisoned by the political authorities.

This is the world of the first century, and it sounds a lot like the polarization of our twenty-­first-century world.

It’s against this backdrop that we are to hear Paul’s words: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom. 12:2). In contrast to the worldly, divisive, and polarizing patterns of this world, Paul gives us a picture of what a God-­transformed life could look like (Rom. 12:9–21). It is a way of life that recognizes the gifts in others; honors and is devoted to one another; is patient, generous, and empathetic; seeks harmony and peace; and is willing to associate with outsiders.

In short, it is a life that practices hospitality (Rom. 12:13).

Works Cited Civic Hospitality Project. “Jesus at the Table.” civichospitality.com/lesson/ hospitality/jesus-­at-­the-­table/.

Mouw, Richard J. Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World.

IVP Books, 2010.

Thiselton, Anthony. Why Hermeneutics? An Appeal Culminating with Ricoeur.

Cascade Books, 2019.

Virkler, Henry. Hermeneutics: Principles and Processes of Biblical Interpretation. Baker Academic, 2007.

Mark VanderWerf (MDiv, MEd) teaches Bible at Grand Rapids Christian High School where he also serves as chaplain. Previously, he taught history and literature at Calvin Christian High School in Escondido, California. He is an ordained minister in the Christian Reformed Church.

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Don’t Be a Jonah KELLI BOENDER

A

s a teacher in a Christian high school—and a social studies teacher at that—I have found the past few years a little tough politically. No matter your content area, you may have experienced one of these situations in some form: You give a few minutes for students to present about the news each week and ask for their input on recent stories. A student raises his hand and asks if you are “woke.”

A parent reaches out to you about a list of content you are teaching in US History and wants to discuss it at parent-­teacher conferences.

A relative goes on a political rant on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or the like and tags you in it.

A student hands in a reflection paragraph based on a class period and the paragraph is full of politically driven imagery that is not really connected to the class, but they clearly have drawn their own connections about class materials. The reflection ends with “my teacher is so biased.”

You can fill in your own scenario here. As an educator, I know that many of us instantly dread these situations and spend the next twenty-­four hours obsessing about them, weaving a narrative about the home of this student or relative, preparing our talking points, and really doing all we can to win the conversation. We engage in an “us versus them” type mentality that mirrors our collective culture. We may think about “them” as proverbial losers for allowing this narrative to be their reality and feel superior for our approach.

Maybe you draft an email that breaks down point by point why they are wrong and circulate it among your colleagues. Or maybe you freeze.

You melt. You collapse in your classroom. You avoid talking to the student or person who raised the situation. You hide. You don’t tell anyone about it and adopt a “woe is me” victim attitude. Or maybe you spend the next twelve hours telling everyone you come across in your building about the situation, building a coalition of people who will most definitely be on your side, and it’s a gossip fest.

For most of us, reactions to these types of situations are negative—at least at the outset. I would guess you lose sleep, cry to your spouse or a friend, or question your identity as a teacher. Maybe your reaction is none of these emotions I have listed above—you feel like you did a great job defending your point and sleep well at night knowing you won that argument.

I’m not sure that any of these reactions are hospitable because they reveal self-­pity, self-­righteousness, and some contempt.

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We engage in an “us versus them” type mentality that mirrors our collective culture.

I was not at all focusing on God’s love and mercy, and I was certainly not thinking about the well-­ being of the people I felt positioned against.

We explored the things that are tearing our country apart, learned what it meant to be hospitable, and then developed a curriculum that was pedagogically hospitable while also teaching students how and why to be hospitable.

I recently read through the prophet Jonah’s story and was struck by how much of myself I could see in his story. Jonah’s call from God was to tell his enemies to repent and turn back to God. Jonah does this, but he does it after running away, never apologizing, and generally being a terrible person. He even delivers his message, sees the people repent, and then sits on a hillside waiting for Nineveh to get burned up in holy fire. His own self-­pitying reactions at each step of the story stood out to me as a reflection of myself in political conflict. In addition to the self-­pity, he’s self-­righteous, dramatic, and not embodying the redemptive message he brings. Ultimately, he’s filled with contempt and a very dualistic view of “us and them.” Upon reflection, I realized that people whom I have viewed as my political enemies are the people for whom I was wishing destruction, from whom I was running away, and about whom I was then crying when they got something right.

Self-­pity ran rampant, and I was repeatedly making the story all about me and how I felt that the story should go. I was not at all focusing on God’s love and mercy, and I was certainly not thinking about the well-­being of the people I felt positioned against.

Contempt is an important reason why we find political conflict today exhausting and degrading. Arthur Brooks, political analyst and author, refers to today’s political division as “motive attribution asymmetry” in his 2019 New York Times article. He basically means that I see my team as good and the other team as evil and therefore not worthy of any compromise or conversation. As a teacher of social studies, history, and civics, I found the first years of my teaching career marked by this type of emotional upheaval as I watched contempt grow between political parties. I had grown up in Christian communities and seen division, but the division that I was seeing grow out of politics was more intense, completely disillusioning, and hurtful. I couldn’t believe that people would say such horrible things to me as their child’s teacher, or in general as an adult in this society. What I didn’t see was how my heart was hardening, and how I was becoming bitter. I was developing contempt toward fellow Christians.

There has to be a better way, yes?

In the fall of 2020, I joined the Civic Hospitality Project team as a curriculum-­writing teacher. As a project team, we explored the things that are tearing our country apart, learned what it meant to be hospitable, and then developed a curriculum that was pedagogically hospitable while also teaching students how and why to be hospitable. Throughout this process, I found myself really questioning my own motives and growing personally, even as I helped write lessons that would encapsulate the idea of hospitality.

This past year, I spent time incorporating the Civic Hospitality Project into my curriculum, my classroom, and my life. Let me tell you: I think hospitality is what we were all missing. And I’m talking about real, biblical hospitality. Hospitality in the sense that I am using here is best exemplified in the way that Jesus conducted himself. Jesus practiced this radical hospitality by sitting down to meals, asking questions, and then offering suggestions.

But hospitality is more than sharing a meal. It’s a way of being. Hospitality is not tolerance, but it is choosing to approach a situation from a human (imago Dei) point of view instead of a divisive point of view. Hospitality is not about winning an argument or proving your ideas are better. Hospitality is about engaging someone else, learning about what they love, and choosing 36

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to see the image of God in them. A hospitable conversation goes back to the Bible’s narrative and roots us once again in God’s Word. Hospitality is the opposite, in many ways, of Jonah’s example of self-­pity, self-­righteousness, and contempt.

Throughout the school year, my students started referring to these hospitality lessons as the “secret third option” or the “Jesus option” when we were talking about really divisive or culturally polarizing topics.

In my interdisciplinary government, economics, and English class, I incorporated hospitality by starting the year reading Lord of the Flies, developing and considering the ways that humanity operates as it attempts to set up government structures. I was meeting state standards while also deeply infusing faith and a Christian worldview in the lesson plans. Together, the class brainstormed some questions about the nature of the imago Dei and the government. Here’s a sampling of the questions: How do you humanize people? Dehumanize people?

Do we need governments? Does God want us to have a government?

What is the role of the government in helping humans get along?

How should humans and the government work together?

Can the government be hospitable?

If we really believe in the imago Dei, then how does a government need to be organized?

To support our reading of Lord of the Flies, we investigated the writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and also read passages from 2 Samuel and Psalms. I hosted multiple Socratic seminars where students wrestled with, discussed, and wrote on the above questions, and then we all looked at hospitable flaws and positives in our current system. Students were encouraged and eventually required to acknowledge where they didn’t agree, to ask curious questions, to find valid counter-­arguments, and to understand why a peer was thinking what they were thinking.

From there, we watched Hamilton as a historical study of the beginnings of the US government, but we also reviewed and discussed our culture’s obsession with othering and making everything about “us versus them,” which is also a thread in the musical. From there, we read Scripture, looking at how Jesus responded when faced with similar problems.* Students were challenged to think and write about their own political narrative and how they want, day by day, to engage in politics and political discussion. To put their ideas into action, students purposefully interviewed people they knew they disagreed with on politics, and we debriefed that experience as a class.

From there, we came up with a class list of daily hospitable acts that we reviewed weekly and held one another accountable to.

As we started the second semester, I saw a shift in our class norms, where students became uncomfortable with a one-­sided narrative—they recognized it as inherently inhospitable. I attribute the Civic Hospitality lesson on stories to this aha! moment in our class. This stories lesson is designed to help students realize how stories we listen to or immerse ourselves in may be leaving out someone’s perspective. The lesson runs students through some modules where they read news stories about the same event * See civichospitality.com/lesson/hospitality/jesus-­at-­the-­table for this lesson.

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Throughout the school year, my students started referring to these hospitality lessons as the “secret third option” or the “Jesus option” when we were talking about really divisive or culturally polarizing topics.

To put their ideas into action, students purposefully interviewed people they knew they disagreed with on politics, and we debriefed that experience as a class.

I could see the light bulbs go off above their heads: incredibly biased stories are not hospitable.

from wildly different perspectives. They then engage in conversation, answering questions in small groups, and soon realize that some of them were not given the same information as their classmates. The debrief of this lesson was particularly powerful, as we reflected individually and discussed collectively our reaction to this experience.* I reminded students of our lesson about the imago Dei and othering one another from the previous semester, and I could see the light bulbs go off above their heads: incredibly biased stories are not hospitable. At that moment, they experienced how a hospitable kingdom approach can change the narrative in their own hearts.

At that moment, they saw a glimpse of what Jesus calls each of us to do as his followers. As a teacher, I knew that I needed to build on that moment for the rest of the semester. I worked every day to do that.

Placing hospitality at the forefront of your mind when planning lessons and designing curriculum is tiring. I can attest to that after this school year.

But this was a different kind of tiredness than I have felt before when I engaged in politically charged or conflict-­ridden topics. Hospitality made conflict exhausting but also fulfilling. I found my faith restored and strengthened over this past year of teaching, as I saw the work in our project bear fruit with my students. I felt confident addressing conflicts with parents about curriculum or class content, and I even had parents reach out to me and say thank you for bringing ideas to their own dinner tables.

Let me challenge you: As the political climate continues to creep into classrooms and communities, any amount of work to stop the stream of these divisive tendencies should be pursued because we all have watched churches, homes, and communities be torn apart. Seek hospitality as educators, parents, and church members. Don’t be a Jonah.

Work Cited Brooks, Arthur C. “Our Culture of Contempt.” New York Times: Opinion, 2 Mar. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/political​ -­polarization.html.

Kelli Boender is a teacher, wife, and mother who desires to see God’s justice brought to a world that is hurting and crying out for him. She enjoys a good book, gardening, and learning new things.

* See civichospitality.com/lesson/stories/story-­template for this lesson.

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October 2023

Christian Educators Journal