Hospitable Witnessing

Drawing on her own experience of befriending a person suffering from a long-term mental health challenge, Priscilla Oh reflects on the meaning of care and friendship theologically. Using autoethnography, she goes beyond the personal experience and examines various issues surrounding mental health. Hospitable Witnessing candidly takes readers into the everyday life of being with a mentally ill person. There are emotional challenges and contingencies in sustaining friendship and caring for a person with a long-term mental health problem. Oh points out that those who care for a loved one during a long-term illness inevitably experience “burnout” resulting from the constant care requirements. Under such an enormous disruption, we need to be compassionate toward another’s suffering and be willing to be present and available for them. This book suggests our need of one another and identifies three important Christian practices: caring as we are being made in the image of God, compassion as being present with the sufferer, and lament as to revitalize our faith and hope.

Intervervening in a lively debate in contemporary European philosophy, this book offers a radically revisioned account of the self subjected to experience. Patiently yet vigorously engaging Jean-Luc Marion's reading of selfhood in St Augustine, Martis reaches back deeply into the Western Philosophical tradition to propose a bold solution to the phemomenological problem of how a self can recognise an other, while remiaining itself. Insights from Descartes, Kant, Derrida, Blanchot, Romano and others are brought together to undergird an account of a self that remains itself only in ceaseless loss to necessary incursions of the other: "I Welcome therefore I am."

Witness is an anthology comprising 40 critical essays from an international cast of researchers who engage with a complex set of questions concerning notions of witnessing and attestation in 20th- and 21st-century Western culture. The contributors provide insightful perspectives on the subject of witnessing and suggest how this vital yet relatively unexplored concept lends itself to a wide range of media and subject areas. The essays critically reconsider existing scholarly tendencies which focus on historical evidence and the witness' vocalization of true remembrance. They do this by establishing important links with canonical texts, images, and voices within a theoretical and interpretive framework where questions of mediation, memorization, and representation are addressed.

The Centenary of the World Missionary Conference, held in Edinburgh in 1910, is a suggestive moment for many people seeking direction for Christian mission in the twenty-first century. Since 2005 an international group has worked collaboratively to develop an intercontinental and multidenominational project, now known as Edinburgh 2010, and based at New College, University of Edinburgh.

This volume focuses on hospitality as a theoretically and historically crucial phenomenon in Shakespeare's work with ramifications for contemporary thought and practice. Drawing a multifaceted picture of Shakespeare's scenes of hospitality—with their numerous scenes of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and sheltering—the collection demonstrates how hospitality provides a compelling frame for the core ethical, political, theological, and ecological questions of Shakespeare's time and our own. By reading Shakespeare's plays in conjunction with contemporary theory as well as early modern texts and objects—including almanacs, recipe books, husbandry manuals, and religious tracts — this book reimagines Shakespeare's playworld as one charged with the risks of hosting (rape and seduction, war and betrayal, enchantment and disenchantment) and the limits of generosity (how much can or should one give the guest, with what attitude or comportment, and under what circumstances?). This substantial volume maps the terrain of Shakespearean hospitality in its rich complexity, demonstrating the importance of historical, rhetorical, and phenomenological approaches to this diverse subject.

Examines how colonial and postcolonial violence is understood and conceptualized through Indigenous storytelling. Through the study of Indigenous literary and artistic practices from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, Julia V. Emberley examines the ways Indigenous storytelling discloses and repairs the traumatic impact of social violence in settler colonial nations. She focuses on Indigenous storytelling in a range of cultural practices, including novels, plays, performances, media reports, Internet museum exhibits, and graphic novels. In response to historical trauma such as that experienced at Indian residential schools, as well as present-day violence against Indigenous bodies and land, Indigenous storytellers make use of Indigenous spirituality and the sacred to inform an ethics of hospitality. They provide uncanny configurations of political and social kinships between people, between the past and the present, and between the animate and inanimate. This book introduces readers to cultural practices and theoretical texts concerned with bringing Indigenous epistemologies to the discussion of trauma and colonial violence.

What practices might a community of faith take up that will bear witness to the alternative world Jesus envisions and calls us towards? That is the question that Grandview Calvary Baptist Church, an initially small and fragile group of Christ followers, has kept asking over the last twenty years. Along the way, this small group has spawned a vibrant community of faith that has traveled along four trajectories towards a shared life in community, radical hospitality, justice for the least, and confession leading to transformation. In a culture where individualism, consumerism, injustice, and autonomy shape us all, these practices have re-shaped not only the people of this church but also the neighborhood they inhabit in the East side of Vancouver, British Columbia. For anyone wanting to recover ancient but newly shaped practices of the first disciples, Plunging into the Kingdom Way offers renewed hope. By relating their story in conversation with a host of theologians, sociologists, and philosophers, Tim Dickau sparks the imagination for how you and your friends, your community, or your church can live out the radical vision of Jesus in your neighborhood today. Plunge in and you will discover renewed hope that you can actually follow the way of Jesus today.

Re-envisioning multiculturalism in Canada In 1971, Canada became the first nation in the world to officially declare its bilingual and multicultural policies. Reconstructions of Canadian Identity examines what has changed over the past fifty years, highlighting the lived experiences of marginalized Canadians and offering insights into the critical work that lies ahead. Editors Vander Tavares and Maria João Maciel Jorge bring together a wide range of disciplines and perspectives to investigate inclusion and exclusion within the processes, discourses, and practices that forge and frame Canadian identity. Chapters analyze ways current multicultural policies continue to benefit the dominant groups and (further) harm minoritized ones. Exposing the pitfalls of established notions of Canadian identity, this volume moves traditionally othered identities—immigrant, racialized, hybridized, Indigenous, and women—to the forefront. In doing so, it reveals how these identities negotiate and claim legitimacy, arguing for a reconceptualization from the margins that truly fosters diversity and inclusion. Illustrating both the shortcomings of and possibilities for a more inclusive multiculturalism in Canada, Reconstructions of Canadian Identity invites readers to reflect on what it means to be Canadian in the twenty-first century.