Hospitality to the Text

At the beginning of one of the courses I teach at Mount Angel Seminary, Writing in the Humanities, I am going to take a day to discuss hospitality to the text.  We usually understand what it means to be hospitable to another person in our physical presence; we listen closely when he are speaking, and we attend to his needs and comfort.  These actions are not necessarily dependent on whether we like this person or agree with her ideas.

We will be discussing how to apply hospitality to the texts in front of us, written by people we will never meet face to face.  I will use the book A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love by Alan Jacobs as a jumping off point for this discussion.

A Theology of Reading along with some of the texts
I have been or will be teaching at Mount Angel Seminary.

 Below are two of the pertinent passages I will draw from the first chapter of Jacob's book:

But the hermeneutics of love requires that books and authors, however alien to the beliefs and practices of the Christian life, be understood and treated as neighbors (13).

But if our love is only preferential - if we select some books as the proper and worthy recipients of our love, while excluding others from our charmed circle . . . it fails to achieve genuine Christian charity.  Charity demands that we extend the gift of love to all books, and receive the gift of love when it is offered to us (33).