How Many Steps Haven’t We Walked in Barefoot? Notes Towards a Theopoetics of Hospitality

Abstract

The history of humankind is often told from an evolutionary perspective, in which sedentary life is valued as qualitatively more developed than that lived nomadically. Nonetheless, the same history also offers a testimony of the status viatoris of human condition, of which the migratory movements are merely an expression of it. The perpetual motion of human communities often raises ambivalent, as well as paradoxical, of belonging and marginality. In many places of our contemporary society, feelings of hostility towards the marginality tend to grow in traditional Christian communities, which from our point of view is to be considered as a deviation of Christianity from its matrix foundations. Therefore, from a theopoetic approach – to which we shall invoke contemporary Portuguese poets, such as Sophia de Mello Breyner, Ruy and Daniel Faria – we aim to carry out an articulation of a theological discourse to return the Gospel to Christianity, that place of theological accomplishment of liminality.