Welcome as a Way of Life: A Practical Theology of Jean Vanier

This book is about the theology of Jean Vanier. Drawing from Vaniers writings it situates Vaniers 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 LArche. At a deeper level this book assesses Vaniers 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 Gods providence and a conduit of Gods presence in the world. Walls 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 LArche way of life. Its the radical otherness of LArche 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.