Parabola's Winter 1990 issue:
Hospitality To know that
guest and
host were once the same word, as were also
give and
receive, opens a window in the mind; yet another window opens when we look at the root meanings of
please and
thanks, those taken-for-granted words of our daily exchanges. But why should it
please someone to give me what I ask for? What is the pleasure of the host? And what does
thank you mean? The English word, oddly enough, originally meant to think and to feel; the French word means mercy, and the Spanish, grace. Big ideas for such commonplace words! What do they imply? Can guest and host, if they understand their relation, share these wonderful gifts? --from the editorial Focus
Cover: "The Trinity" by Andrei Rublev Fifteenth-century Russian icon depicting the hospitality of Abraham to the three angels under the Oak of Mamre Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Photograph copyright Art Resource, New York
In this issue:
- "Philoxenia and Hospitality" by Lambros Kamperidis
- Traditional and classical views of the guest-host relationship
- "What Holds the Water, What Holds the Light" by Linda Hogan
- Vessels for an exchange of grace
- "The Stranger Within" by Helen M. Luke
- The journey to self-acknowledgment and wholeness
- "The Hostage and the Parasite" by Paul Jordan-Smith
- Distortions of the host-guest relationship
- ARCS: "Room for the Dance"
- "Giveaway for the Gods": An interview with Arthur Amiotte
- A Lakota artist speaks of ceremonial exchange among the Sioux
- "Knights Hospitallers" by Philip Zaleski
- The rise and fall of a chivalric order of Christian caregiving
- "Stone Soup" by P. L. Travers
- The story of the sly traveller
- "Days with Albert Schweitzer" by Frederick Franck
- Personal glimpses of a uniquely hospitable twentieth-century legend
- "And He Ran to Greet Them" by Daniel S. Wolk
- Abraham as a prototype of Bedouin cordiality to strangers
Tangents - Reviews
- "Surprised by Grace" by Rob Baker
- Review of Babette's Feast, a film based on an Isak Dinesen tale
Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world
- "Three Tales of Mullah Nasr-Eddin" / Traditional
- "The Boy Who Lived with the Bears" / Abenaki - by Joseph Bruchac
- "Plain Welcome" / Amish - by Wendell Berry
- "The Rich Man, the Baal Shem Tov, and King David" / Jewish
