Freedom and the Stranger

Making a Home for All

“I ain't got no home, I'm just a-roaming 'round,
Just a wandering worker, I go from town to town.
And the police make it hard wherever I may go,
And I ain't got no home in this world anymore.” – Woody Guthrie

“Sometimes we live no particular way but our own
Sometimes we visit your country and live in your home…
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world
The heart has its beaches, its homeland, and thoughts of its own” – Grateful Dead

Solidarity is a Seafaring Vessel

In my last post I ended with the image of pushing a raft out to sea. On reflection, it’s a bleak metaphor for freedom—an image of lonely risk and existential dread. If freedom means drifting alone across an endless ocean, perhaps one might be better off ashore. Yet it captures what Kierkegaard called the “dizziness of freedom.”

No one would choose to remain in that condition. What if the vessel were more seaworthy? What if it had a mast, a rudder, and a sail—and, better yet, a crew of salt-licked sailors? Freedom need not be lonely. A few dear readers reached out after that post with notes of care and concern. Whether they know it or not, they are members of my ghost crew on this journey to lands unknown—the Flying Dutchman of my mind.

As Camus reminds us, freedom is both a revolt against the absurd and a turn toward meaning. And meaning is made only in relation with others. Without the care of others, our freedom would be hollow, alienating, and lonely—hardly freedom at all. For Hegel, the aim of freedom is reconciliation with the world, recognition in the eyes of the other, a shared freedom. My freedom is your freedom. As Camus puts it, “I rebel, therefore we are.”

If alienation is the feeling of not having a home in the world, then freedom is the heart seeking to feel at home in the world.

A Stranger in a Strange Land

When I think of that feeling of homelessness, my mind goes back more than twenty years to my first night in Paraguay as a Peace Corps volunteer. After three days of training in Miami and a twelve-hour flight to Asunción, my cohort of volunteers was driven out to the edge of the capital to meet our host families for the first three months of in-country training. My family lived in a modest farmhouse with three rooms and an outdoor kitchen. They showed me to a small bedroom just as night was falling.

I closed the shutters against the dark and sat on the bed. Anxious and exhausted, I listened to the hum of insects, the barking dogs, and the murmur of Guaraní in the next room. The feeling came over me: I was farther from home than I had ever been.

And yet the dread didn’t last long. My hosts fed me, looked after me, teased me, and took pride in me, as though I were a member of the family—or at least an exotic pet worth caring for. Over the months that followed, I experienced this generosity again and again. Families invited me to share tereré in their kitchens, mothers welcomed me into quinceañeras, fishermen served mandioca and tripe stew from shacks on the river. For a couple of weeks one October, a banker whose son had moved to New York drive me to his house to watch the Red Sox and Yankees battle for the pennant, so I could explain baseball to him.

Time and again, strangers welcomed me in.

What struck me most was not just their kindness, but the pride they took in showing it. Hospitality was not an afterthought but a practice, a way of life. In a place with little material abundance and a slower pace of time, relationships were the greatest wealth.

That was my first deep encounter with what it means to be both a stranger and at home—to feel alienated and then received. Whenever the loneliness of individual striving creeps in, I’m reminded that what matters most is not the record of our accomplishments but the bonds of recognition and care that make us human.

Hospitality and the Ethics of Freedom

Hospitality is an ethic of delayed reciprocity, offered to the Other without expectation yet calling us to responsibility beyond ourselves. My host family did not expect me to pay them back; the fishermen did not expect me to return with gifts; the banker did not invite me because he wanted a favor. And yet hospitality is never without consequence. It creates a sense of obligation—not a debt between giver and receiver, but a debt the receiver owes to the world itself, to pass it on. In that sense it is contagious, a viral virtue.

This ethic runs deep. Though their cosmologies differ, both indigenous and biblical traditions place the stranger at the center of moral life. Anthropologists have long noted that in many indigenous societies—from Māori manaakitanga in Aotearoa to guest-friendship practices among North American nations—hospitality was treated not as courtesy but as sacred duty. Moses names his son Gershom, “for I have been a stranger in a strange land” (Ex. 2:22). Jesus teaches in Matthew, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Mt. 25:35). The biblical tradition makes hospitality not merely a social courtesy but a theological command: to welcome the stranger is to recall our own history of estrangement, and to enact God’s hospitality in the world.

Philosophers have delved into these ideas as a root source of ethical being. Emmanuel Levinas insists that our most basic obligation arises in the face of the Other—the stranger who makes a claim on us simply by existing. In that encounter we discover that freedom is not solitary will but the shared capacity to make room for one another. Jacques Derrida, taking his cue from Levinas, highlights the paradox of hospitality: pure, unconditional welcome is impossible, for there are always conditions, borders, and rules. Even so, we are called to lean toward that impossible ideal—to minimize violence and maximize care, to keep alive the spirit of welcome.

Less obviously, the ethic of hospitality also shapes our debates over tolerance and free speech. Karl Popper saw the “paradox of tolerance”: if tolerance is extended without limit, it can enable intolerance to rise and ultimately destroy tolerance itself. Hannah Arendt described the public sphere as a “space of appearance”—a fragile, shared stage where individuals reveal themselves to one another in word and deed, and where freedom becomes real through plural action. Intolerant actors, in this sense, become a test of our hospitality: do we permit those who would abolish plurality itself to overrun the common space? Derrida deepens the dilemma with his notion of hostipitality: every welcome already contains a trace of exclusion, since the host’s power to admit always implies the power to refuse. Hospitality thus risks curdling into hostility. Democracy endures only by keeping that risk visible and by renewing the fragile space in which freedom together can appear.

Recently, some of the loudest defenders of “free speech” have revealed their claims in bad faith. Those who once railed against cancel culture now embrace government censorship or algorithmic suppression when it serves their interests. This is a betrayal of hospitality: accepting the welcome of the public sphere while denying that same welcome to others. In Arendt’s terms, such hypocrisy corrodes the fragile space of appearance; in Derrida’s, it turns hospitality into hostility.

Making a Home for Freedom

Hospitality says, mi casa es tu casa—my home is your home, my world is your world. Pure hospitality may never be fully achieved, but the project of freedom is nothing less than making everyone at home in the world.

In a free and pluralistic society there will always be friction at the borders of this ideal. But democracy is ultimately measured by how we treat the stranger. Do we welcome them into our imagined community, or deny them space at our table?

When we see that my freedom is your freedom, freedom itself becomes hospitality: a vulnerable yet generative process of opening to difference, of recognizing what Thích Nhất Hạnh called our “interbeing,” and of building a home we can share.