Consider the following comments on hospitality.
A culture reveals itself in how it treats the guest it did not invite.
Hospitality offered as performance is only generosity asking for an audience.
The stranger at the gate tests a society more honestly than any law.
We open our doors widest to those who least remind us of what we fear to become.
True welcome asks nothing of the guest, not even gratitude.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that hospitality is one of the oldest moral tests a society sets itself, and that a culture's real values show not in how it treats the welcome guest but in how it receives the inconvenient one. Open by acknowledging the ancient weight of the custom, that nearly every tradition has held the sheltering of the stranger as close to sacred. Then complicate it: hospitality is easily corrupted into display, a generosity staged for reputation rather than offered for need. A strong third move scales the idea up from the household to the nation, where the language of welcome collides with the politics of borders and the fear of the outsider. Caution: resist the easy moralising that treats all openness as virtue, since hospitality without any limit can also be a failure to protect those already inside the door.