The Sharing of a Life Is Not Sharing a Building: Two Kinds of Hospitality

Dorothy Day, The Houses of Hospitality, and a World Beyond Tolerance

This is part of a continuing series for supporting subscribers, introducing the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement Dorothy Day. You can read the intro here. One of my next book-length projects will be putting the moral vision of Dorothy Day into conversation with contemporary thinkers, so consider this some rough draft thinking.

Hospitality As Politic: Dealing With Contested Space

Much of Dorothy Day’s life turned on this notion of hospitality. She and Peter Maurin co-founded their house in New York City as a “house of hospitality”, a place in which people could live, work, and pray together, offering the poor a place to have dignity, work, prayer, and companionship. For Day, hospitality was a central concern of her mission, not only because it signified what God has done for us, but how we are to participate in God’s knitting together of a fractured world. Hospitality, sharing the root of the word “hospice”, means that the invitation in was for one’s healing.

And so, sorting out what exactly we mean by “hospitality” is important here.

Much democratic discourse presumes that, since we live in a pluralist society, and since we don’t aspire to live in little enclaves isolated from one another, one of the key virtues of liberal democracies is hospitality¹. What is meant most frequently here is that the world we live in is shared, and that when I go to the library or to the city council, that it should be in principle be open to whoever is a member of the greater Abilene area.

All this raises the question of hospitality’s limits and function. What if someone is just passing through the area? What if I have extended family staying for a few weeks and they want to bring up an issue affecting them due to their long stay, like uncollected trash? Do they have the right to bring up issues? Now consider that it’s not necessary someone’s family, but someone who wants to peaceably live in that area? Is the city obliged not just to live them exist there, but to include—for example—their children in public schooling? To live with others with whom you disagree invites us to consider how we might get along, and what practically is required.

Central here is notion of common possession—all persons are extended rights, and so, the shared spaces become contested spaces, for they’re owned by everyone and supposedly for everyone, and not on the basis of how much you use them or how much you contribute². Everyone in a circumscribed polity technically have a share in the common home: I don’t have kids in the public schools, but I do pay taxes for them, as do my octogenarian and childless neighbors. And so, public goods and institutions are under the sway of everyone, whether or not they have direct use of them³. And so, even the octogenarian gets to vote on public school issues.

You don’t have to like it. But they’re in the house. And hospitality helps keep the doors open.

Hospitality, in political conversations, has a functional and preservative purpose, has to do with how people share a contested space, and how people recognize their limited influence over that common space. Hospitality serves, in the end, as a matter of self-restraint in an otherwise agonistic world.

Dorothy’s version of hospitality takes us into a deeper, and more uncomfortable place.