In this book, theologian Letty Russell redefines the commonly held notion of hospitality as she challenges her readers to consider what it means to welcome the stranger. In doing so, she implores persons of faith to join the struggles for justice.
Rather than an act of limited, charitable welcome, Russell maintains that true hospitality is a process that requires partnership with the "other" in our divided world. The goal is "just hospitality," that is, hospitality with justice.
Russell draws on feminist and postcolonial thinking to show how we are colonized and colonizing, each of us bearing the marks of the history that formed us. With an insightful analysis of the power dynamics that stem from our differences and a constructive theological theory of difference itself, Russell proposes concrete strategies to create a more just practice of hospitality.

Letty M. Russell was one of the world's foremost feminist theologians and a longtime member of the faculty of Yale Divinity School. She died on July 12, 2007, at age 77. She was one of the first women ordained in the United Presbyterian Church and served as pastor of the Presbyterian Church of the Ascension in East Harlem for ten years. She joined the faculty of Yale Divinity School in 1974 and retired in 2001. She wrote and edited numerous books, including Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church, Dictionary of Feminist Theologies (with J. Shannon Clarkson), and Inheriting Our Mothers' Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective (with Kwok Pui Lan, Ada Maria Isasi Dias, and Katie Cannon).