A product of the Boston College “Guestbook Project,” a multidisciplinary experiment in hospitality directed by Kearney, this volume of high quality and accessible papers probes hospitality as a task toward the stranger, alien, and victim through Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist wisdom traditions (Part 2) under the hermeneutical influence of Levinas and Derrida (Part 1). Although many excellent book‐length studies on religious factionalism and violence are widely available, this volume is among the very best of a growing number to probe the capacity of traditions not only to actualize hospitality toward the stranger but to challenge and deconstruct the very category of stranger by exploring prescriptive religious practices of the heart and mind. The authors lend credence to the view of many in the guild that interreligious dialogues are most fruitful when they are dialogues about and for transformation of personal and communal forms of narrow self‐understanding in the name of a hospitality that welcomes all, yet accepts and preserves differentiation (i.e., radical hospitality), thereby consistently diagnosing and averting the vice of absorption or domestication of the other into something more familiar to the home tradition's gaze. The authors also widen the perennial debates within all traditions concerning identity, otherness, orthodoxy, purity, and moral responsibility. This volume responds, perhaps unwittingly, to the so‐called new atheism, and will invigorate student learning in university classrooms across an array of theological subdisciplines for all intent on responding constructively to the scandals of alienation, violence, and their religious legitimation.
