Gastvrijheid [hospitality] as an epistemic and ethical virtue: Creating spaces for dialogue and difference

This chapter, in honour of Prof. dr. René van Woudenberg, offers a theological and ethical exploration of gastvrijheid (hospitality) as an epistemic and moral virtue, integrating insights from Stanley Hauerwas, Henri Nouwen, Jacques Derrida, Rauna Kuokkanen, and Robert Vosloo. The argument unfolds through three dimensions namely, physical, epistemic, and ethical space, showing how hospitality functions as a political form of the Gospel that embraces difference for the discovery of common goods. Drawing from lived experience at Oud Rustenburg, the essay presents hospitality as the creation of free spaces where strangers are received as co-participants in intellectual and spiritual community. Epistemically, hospitality resists both scientism and cultural dogmatism, cultivating epistemic humility and radical hospitality that welcome marginal or non-dominant knowledges without subsuming them. Ethically, hospitality is embodied in what Vosloo and Venmans term the banality of goodness i.e., ordinary, everyday acts of openness, care, and solidarity that sustain just and inclusive communities. In dialogue with the example of René van Woudenberg, the essay situates hospitality as a virtue that unites ontology, ethics, and epistemology within a public theological vision of amor mundi: a love for the world that manifests the politics of Christ through grace, humility, and the joy of shared life amid difference.