Introduction: Fear and Hospitality

Abstract

Introduction: Fear and Hospitality Björn Krondorfer This CrossCurrents issue is the result of a three‐day roundtable symposium jointly organized by the Martin‐Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University, AZ, and the National Catholic Center of Holocaust Education (Seton Hill University, PA). The symposium Strangers or Neighbors? Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Perspectives on Refugees was held in October 2017 in Flagstaff at Northern Arizona University. We gathered a group of 16 scholars, 14 of whom have contributed to this CrossCurrents issue. The roundtables were organized in such a way as to allow for maximum open conversation among the invited scholars; each scholar offered a short input presentation based on his or her expertise and background. All sessions provided sufficient time for talking with each other (rather than simply at each other), with a threefold purpose: to gain a better understanding of the vital and volatile situation of refugees; to plumb the depth of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions with regard to turning strangers to neighbors; and to engage with each other about positions upon which we agreed or disagreed. These disagreements are, to some extent, preserved in the different contributions assembled here, and we expect that our readers will also find themselves agreeing or disagreeing with particular positions. The goal of the symposium was not to arrive at a mutually agreed‐upon political platform, but to explore various Muslim, Jewish, and Christian perspectives on refugees. While for some, the urgent humanitarian crisis of refugees indisputably calls for a religious ethics summed up in the teaching, “love the stranger as yourself,” others argue for relying upon religious wisdom to create safeguards around welcoming aliens who might harbor hostile intentions. For the latter, there is a genuine fear regarding the potential danger of unrestricted immigration. We also invited three scholars from outside the faith traditions and outside the religious studies field in order to enrich our conversation with knowledge from different disciplinary perspectives. We preserved these three contributions in this journal issue, inserting them as Interventions at different places. Each of these interventions widens the circle of our exploration: It starts with neighborly relations in a town in Maine that integrated Somali immigrants, moves to regional conflicts about migration across indigenous lands at the U.S./Mexico border, and concludes with a global perspective on the links between climate change and mass displacement of populations. During the roundtable symposium, these three perspectives helped us not to get lost in the details of exegetical interpretation and to remain focused on the here and now of a growing concern, namely how to treat with dignity those who have been involuntarily displaced, who have lost their homes and countries, who have been rendered vulnerable in foreign lands, and who have become dependent on the goodwill of their hosts. All of the contributions assembled here can be read as scholarly informed meditations on the plight of refugees and as religiously enriched responses to an urgent crisis. Fear It might be helpful to remind ourselves of the definition of refugees ratified by the Geneva Convention in 1951. Slightly condensed and paraphrased, it says: A refugee is a person outside of his or her country because of a well‐founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion and, because of this fear, cannot count on his or her country's protection nor return to it. It is above all fear that is the driving force for people to escape their homelands and often having to leave their families behind as they flee and journey into the unknown. Reversely, it is fear that prevents people in secure countries to welcome those very same people who have become refugees. “Refugees from the bestiality of wars and despotism” who knock on other people's doors, Zygmunt Bauman writes, are for the “people behind those doors…always strangers,” and “strangers tend to cause anxiety” (). We can point to a telling result of an American survey from the years leading up to the Holocaust. In 1938, when the Nazi party had already been in power for five years in Germany and had systematically excluded and persecuted the Jewish community...