Many of you know and appreciate Gregory Thompson’s quarterly column in Comment, The Welcome Table, which explores the practice of hospitality as it has and continues to surprise some of our society’s most profound moral fractures. Earlier this month, the spirit of The Welcome Table came alive at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Following David Brooks’s Scoper Lecture in Christian Thought, themed “Know Better: Deepening the Bonds of Communal Life,” Comment had the honour of hosting a Welcome Table reception with Thompson.
Launched in 2021, The Welcome Table was created to examine the complex reasons behind our cultural, racial, ecological, and theological divides, and to chart out a new language capable of binding the wounds of a fragile, pain-conscious era. But The Welcome Table aspires to a more ambitious goal than mere understanding: it seeks a return to the communion and fellowship we were created for. The column stimulates practices for hospitality while thoughtfully navigating the multitude of obstacles to a shared table.
Initiatives like The Welcome Table and Comment Suppers reflect Comment’s deeply held conviction that the Christian imagination finds its truest expression in the context of relationships. As Thompson eloquently puts it in the very first Welcome Table column, “Ultimately we are doing all this with one very simple hope: that we, together with our community of readers, might embrace the exhausting and exhilarating work of hospitality as central to the life of faith, hope, and love in our time. Why? Because we believe that it is here, in the act of creating our own shared tables, that we most truly offer and fully experience—in both spiritual and sensual form—that which we and our communities most deeply desire: welcome.”