
My dissertation project revolves around the subject of hospitality, a topic widely discussed in academia over the past decades. Many of those discussions tend to conceptualize hospitality and use it as a metaphor in other conversations than that of hospitality itself. In contrast to such views I emphasize that hospitality is foremost a practice which involves virtues and vices, and I want to explore how such an understanding might reshape discussions on hospitality. I critically discuss two contemporary conceptualizations of hospitality, those of political theorist Seyla Benhabib and of theologian Luke Bretherton. I then turn to explore how hospitality has been articulated in theological texts by John Wesley and before him in the Rule of St Benedict, specifically from the viewpoint of ideas on virtue. This study is thus both a critique of current understandings of hospitality and an attempt to reimagine hospitality as practice.