Week 7

ARCH bases itself around the motto is that “everyone deserves the dignity of having a safe place to call home.” I believe that one’s home is symbolic in this case as a place where an individual can go and feel safe and call their . Having a home is something we all take for granted. I am in the process of investigating the value of having a home and why ARCH’s central motto focuses on the importance of an individual have a safe home. Emmanuel Levians has a philosophy that gears toward the possibility of responsibility and hospitality. As described by Levinas, hospitality operates in two distinct realms, the ethical and the political. In the ethical realm, the self is morally compelled to welcome the individual stranger into the private space of the home. In the public realm, the self is politically obligated to welcome the whole of humanity into the public space of the homeland. He emphasizes that an ethical humanity is an universal responsibility. He goes on to say that an inflection toward humanity is fragile, because it is continually absorbed by the rhetoric of political institutions (“History of Political Thought”). Levians philosophy can be applied to ARCH’s motto on the importance of an individual to have a safe place to call home. According to Levians, it is ethically and politically important that one has a home and remains hospitable.