The Promise and Peril of Home / Miroslav Volf & Ryan McAnnally-Linz

Life under a pandemic forces us to see things in a new way. Just one of those things is the home we live in. The space that should feel most familiar is for some of us starting to feel quite strange. At turns in our day or our week, our homes may go from feeling like a retreat to feeling more like a prison. Of course, this is itself a privileged experience, as essential workers and the homeless face a different reality. In this episode, Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz observe the fraught, tense, and ambivalent nature of our homes—not just our apartments and houses, but the very meaning of the concept. They consider the inequities that have been hiding in plain sight; the definition of home as an essentially permeable, porous, and breathing organism; how crisis upsets the resonance of the beautiful ordinary; an explanation of the ambivalence of home, that is, a place of both hospitality and hostility; and finally, a concluding meditation on the parable of the Prodigal Son and the "unhoming of home.”