The Challenge and Gift of Being-in-the-World: The Hermeneutics of Dwelling and (Be)longing

The Challenge and Gift of Being-in-the-World: The Hermeneutics of Dwelling and (Be)longing"The Greeks had a very interesting word that one can find in Plutarch and that exists in the form of a noun, a verb, and an adjective.It is the word thopoiein, which means making thos, producing thos, transforming one's way of being, one's mode of existence."(Schmidt 43)We might say it all comes back to dwelling, save for the fact that nothing ever breaks free from the tether of dwelling in the first place.That we must dwell is granted us with our being-in-the-world yet how we dwell and indeed how well or poorly we dwell and what enhances, prohibits, or makes dwelling a struggle belong to those circumstances that are at once historical, fated, and the consequences of our freedom to engage them.Each in its own way, the essays collected here interrogate these ideas by showing how our thrownness into this rather than another place to undertake the inescapable task of dwelling has consequences that, when taken together, we might call life itself.Thus, when read as a collection of essays, we encounter in this volume dwelling's universality and its situated particularity-an always tension-filled negotiation with what it might mean to belong-that is to say, what it means to already always belong to both the particular and the universal sense of dwelling.Furthermore, it is out of the universal character of dwelling that many factors, both welcoming and inviting (for some and not for others) or exiling and prohibiting (again, for some and not others) determine our ability and desire to belong.Whether this interrogation of dwelling and belonging is undertaken in the manner of critical empiricism or in the reading and