The Stranger S Gift

A pioneering look at the implications of Christian faith for foreign language education. It has become clear in recent years that reflection on foreign language education involves more than questioning which methods work best. This new volume carries current discussions of the value-laden nature of foreign language teaching into new territory by exploring its spiritual and moral dimensions. David Smith and Barbara Carvill show how the Christian faith sheds light on the history, aims, content, and methods of foreign language education. They also propose a new approach to the field based on the Christian understanding of hospitality.

The Strangers Book explores how various nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger. Rejecting the idea that humans have easy access to a common reserve of experiences and emotions, they countered the notion that a person can use a supposed knowledge of human nature to claim full understanding of any other person's life. Instead they posited that being a stranger, unknown and unknowable, was an essential part of the human condition. Affirming the unknown and unknowable differences between people, as individuals and in groups, laid the groundwork for an ethical and democratic society in which all persons could find a place. If everyone is a stranger, then no individual or class can lay claim to the characteristics that define who gets to be a human in political and public arenas. Lloyd Pratt focuses on nineteenth-century African American writing and publishing venues and practices such as the Colored National Convention movement and literary societies in Nantucket and New Orleans. Examining the writing of Frederick Douglass in tandem with that of the francophone free men of color who published the first anthology of African American poetry in 1845, he contends these authors were never interested in petitioning whites for sympathy or for recognition of their humanity. Instead, they presented a moral imperative to develop practices of stranger humanism in order to forge personal and political connections based on mutually acknowledged and always evolving differences.

Excerpt from The Stranger's Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present It is to recollections like these that the Stranger's Gift owes its origin. It is offered to those who have cheered the stranger's path through the for eign land, and who, in return, will kindly receive this token that they are remembered by him. He approaches them once more as a stranger, since at the time of Christmas, he can only feel at home among the scenes of the past; yet he indulges the hope that this Gift will serve to strengthen the ties by which he is united to them, that it will bring him near to many a kindred mind, to whom he is now a stranger in the literal sense of the word, and finally, that the spirit in which this Gift is presented will testify to the truth that we all are but strangers and pilgrims on the earth. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in his famous exploration of the gift in "primitive" and archaic societies, showed that the essential aspect of the exchange of presents involved the establishment of a social tie that bound the parties together above and beyond any material value of the objects exchanged. He argued that these intangible mutual "debts" constituted the social fabric. Godbout and Caillé show that, contrary to the modern assumption that societies function on the basis of market exchange and the pursuit of self-interest, the gift still constitutes the foundation of our social fabric. The authors describe the gift not as an object but as a social connection, perhaps the most important social connection because it creates a sense of obligation to respond in kind. They examine the gift in a broad range of cases such as blood and organ donation; volunteer work; the bonds between friends, couples, and family; Santa Claus; the interaction between performers and their audience; and the relation of the artist to society. Written in an engaging manner, The World of the Gift will appeal to anyone who is interested in how the world really operates.

Strangers in Yemen is a study of travel to Yemen in the nineteenth century by Jews, Christians and Muslims. The travelers include a missionary, artist, scientist, rabbi, merchant, adventurer and soldier. The focus is on the encounter between people of different cultures, and the chapters analyze the travelers’ accounts to elucidate how strangers and locals perceived each other, and how the experiences shaped their perceptions of themselves. Cultural encounter is among the most important challenges of our time, a time of global migration and instant communication. Today, as in the past, history provides a valuable tool for illuminating the human experience, and this scholarly work stimulates us to contemplate the challenge of cultural encounter, for it affects us all.