ABSTRACT
A faith which seeks to connect needs to explore hospitality in religions and societies looking backwards to the ancient world, its links with and distances from religion. Notions of hospitality have different cultural connotations, raise different expectations and achieve different actualisations, in different religions and cultures. The tradition of hospitality comes down through Arab countries to the literature of the pre-Islamic period, involving protection from persecution and personal security. In Buddhist cultures, hospitality is a duty for all believers, it is particularly enjoined in the case of giving to itinerant members of religious orders, and it operates under an elaborate etiquette within religious orders themselves. In Judaism the strong emphasis on hospitality in the Hebrew Bible continues, with emphasis on the stranger and the importance of sharing food. Hospitality as moral imperative spreads in Europe from the fifteenth century into legal and political literature, into the developing social sciences, into economics and politics.
