The hospitality of listening

A note on sacramental strangeness

Karmen Mackendrick

pp. 98-108

in: Richard Kearney, Kascha Semonovitch (eds), Phenomenologies of the stranger, New York City, Fordham University Press, 2011

Abstract

Among the most promising-seeming possibilities for an ethics linked to theology—always a risky proposition—is that of regarding the world as sacramental. A sacramental sensibility seems, potentially at least, a way to a valuing of some aspects of the world, but not a way particularly welcoming of the strange or the stranger.