Welcome as a Way of Life

This book is about the theology of Jean Vanier. Drawing from Vanier's writings, it situates Vanier's theological thinking on community, care, and what it means to be and become human in the context of ""welcome."" This book draws attention to how welcome, for Vanier, is a visible expression of genuine hospitality, friendship, and human growth, offering an alternative way of conceiving and naming the social forming dynamics within Christian community, with special attention given to how welcome occurs within the communities of L'Arche. At a deeper level, this book assesses Vanier's thinking on the place and role both the self and community play in welcoming the truth of reality as it is revealed and given within community in order to prepare the way for exploring how welcome is a sign of community life, the visible expression of individual and communal trust in God's providence, and a conduit of God's presence in the world.

""Wall's Welcome as a Way of Life is a welcome addition to the growing realization that Jean Vanier and his friends have a lot to teach us about the Lord.""
--Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus, Duke Divinity School

""Benjamin Wall has made an invaluable contribution to our understanding of how the life and writings of Jean Vanier cohere in a precisely articulated vision of Jesus Christ. Wall shows why welcome and responsiveness must be central to any human community, Christian or otherwise, that we want to label 'caring.'""
--Brian Brock, Lecturer in Moral and Practical Theology, University of Aberdeen

""'Welcome,' 'hospitality,' 'community'--while trite in some theological discourses, Wall has retrieved these notions from deep within the Christian tradition with help from a source not expected to yield theological and conceptual robustness: the L'Arche 'way of life.' It's the radical otherness of L'Arche realities that moves practical theology from the margins of applicability to the center, where it will transform Christian imagination and praxis from within. Difference and vulnerability here do real theological work to generate new forms of human relationality, thanks to Welcome as a Way of Life.""
--Amos Yong, Professor of Theology and Mission, Fuller Theological Seminary; Author of Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (2007)

Benjamin S. Wall (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is Assistant Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Philosophy at Greensboro College in Greensboro, NC.