My essay offers a personal reflection on Poteat as both a beloved teacher and philosopher. I suggest that Poteat’s teaching and writing had to do most radically with describing an alternative ontology to the ones that have haunted both modern and postmodern thought. Poteat’s ontology leads him to a profound embrace of the Incarnation and its liturgical celebration in the eucharist.

This essay seeks to incorporate Polanyi’s post-critical conception of knowing more fully into theology by emphasizing that all knowing is a personal activity rooted in a particular place. While deconstruction describes itself as post-critical, its assumption that all knowledge is a social “construct’ and/or an instrument of social coercion fails to account for the involvement of the person in all acts of knowing.

This essay explores the practice of hospitality as a resource for thinking about ethics post-critically. How might the practice of hospitality — rooted in the conviction that our lives are fundamentally constituted by receiving and giving — challenge a modern, critical ethic centered in the autonomous self?