The Joy of Hospitality


Book Description

Share your faith through hosting events in your home...and have fun at the same time.




Practicing Hospitality


Book Description

What makes a person or a home hospitable? Does hospitality call for a beautifully decorated home and a menu filled with gourmet foods, or can it be as simple as offering a friend a cup of tea? In Practicing Hospitality two longtime professors (and practitioners!) of home economics provide both the theological base and the practical knowledge to understand and implement God's plan for hospitality. They provide a blend of theologically sound content, real-life illustrations, and practical application. They focus on developing both the Christian character and practical skills so the act of hospitality is a joy for the host and hostess and a source of encouragement for the guest. Each chapter concludes with recipes and projects that provide readers with an opportunity to personally apply the book's content. Anyone seeking to grow in their knowledge of biblical hospitality will be richly rewarded by the biblical teaching and practical suggestions in this book.




Extraordinary Hospitality (for Ordinary People)


Book Description

How to offer Christian hospitality without becoming exhausted and overburdened. Generous hospitality is a significant way in which God works through our lives to bring life to others, yet many of us feel ill-equipped and overwhelmed at the prospect, especially if we don’t have big houses and we are not wonderful cooks! Carolyn Lacey encourages us to focus on the goal of hospitality, which is to reflect God’s welcoming heart, and shows us how we can all do that, regardless of our bank balance or living situation. She explores seven ways in which we can reflect God’s character in the way we welcome others into our homes and into our lives, and so point people ultimately to Christ. This practical and realistic book explores how to make generous hospitality part of everyday life without becoming exhausted and overburdened.




The Heart of Hospitality


Book Description

Success in today’s rapidly changing hospitality industry depends on understanding the desires of guests of all ages, from seniors and boomers to the newly dominant millennial generation of travelers. Help has arrived with a compulsively-readable new standard, The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets by Micah Solomon, with a foreword by The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company’s president and COO Herve Humler. This up-to-the-minute resource delivers the closely guarded customer experience secrets and on-trend customer service insights of today’s top hoteliers, restaurateurs, and masters of hospitality management including: Four Seasons Chairman Isadore Sharp: How to build an unsinkable company culture Union Square Hospitality Group CEO Danny Meyer: His secrets of hiring, onboarding, training, and more Tom Colicchio (Craft Restaurants, Top Chef): How to create a customer-centric customer experience in a chef-centric restaurant Virgin Hotels CEO Raul Leal: How Virgin Hotels created its innovative, future-friendly hospitality approach Ritz-Carlton President and COO Herve Humler: How to engage today’s new breed of luxury travelers Double-five-star chef and hotelier Patrick O’Connell (The Inn at Little Washington) shares the secrets of creating hospitality connections Designer David Rockwell on the secrets of building millennial-friendly restaurants and hotel spaces (W, Nobu, Andaz) that resonate with today’s travelers Restaurateur Traci Des Jardins on building a “narcissism-free” hospitality culture Legendary chef Eric Ripert’s principles of creating a great guest experiences, simultaneously within a single dining room. The Heart of Hospitality is a hospitality management resource like no other, put together by leading customer service expert Micah Solomon. Filled with exclusive, first-hand stories and wisdom from the top professionals in the industry, The Heart of Hospitality is an essential hospitality industry resource. As Ritz-Carlton President and COO Herve Humler says in his foreword to the book, “If you want to create and sustain a level of service so memorable that it becomes an unbeatable competitive advantage, you’ll find the secrets here.”




Making Room


Book Description

For most of church history, hospitality was central to Christian identity. Yet our generation knows little about this rich, life-giving practice.




The Limits of Hospitality


Book Description

Practicing hospitality is central to building a civil society, not to mention living a Christian life. It can be enriching and joy-filled, but it can also be profoundly demanding and sometimes even dangerous. In The Limits of Hospitality, Jessica Wrobleski explores the ethical questions surrounding the practice of hospitality, particularly hospitality that is informed by Christian theological commitments. While there is no algorithm that distinguishes between ethically "legitimate: " and "llegitimate" boundaries, the variety of circumstances in which hospitality is relevant and the nature of hospitality itself make advocating firm and fixed boundaries difficult. How much more so for Christians, for whom the practice of hospitality should be a manifestation of agape, a participation in God's eschatological welcome extended to all people through Jesus Christ! Are limits to hospitality, then, merely a regrettable concession to our finite and fallen condition? Wrobleski offers a rich theological reflection that will interest anyone who has a role in the practice of hospitality in community? Whether such communities are families, households, churches, educational institutions, or nation-states.




Heads in Beds


Book Description

In the tradition of Kitchen Confidential and Waiter Rant, a rollicking, eye-opening, fantastically indiscreet memoir of a life spent (and misspent) in the hotel industry. “Highly amusing."—New York Times Jacob Tomsky never intended to go into the hotel business. As a new college graduate, armed only with a philosophy degree and a singular lack of career direction, he became a valet parker for a large luxury hotel in New Orleans. Yet, rising fast through the ranks, he ended up working in “hospitality” for more than a decade, doing everything from supervising the housekeeping department to manning the front desk at an upscale Manhattan hotel. He’s checked you in, checked you out, separated your white panties from the white bed sheets, parked your car, tasted your room-service meals, cleaned your toilet, denied you a late checkout, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&Ms out of your minibar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money. In Heads in Beds he pulls back the curtain to expose the crazy and compelling reality of a multi-billion-dollar industry we think we know. Heads in Beds is a funny, authentic, and irreverent chronicle of the highs and lows of hotel life, told by a keenly observant insider who’s seen it all. Prepare to be amused, shocked, and amazed as he spills the unwritten code of the bellhops, the antics that go on in the valet parking garage, the housekeeping department’s dirty little secrets—not to mention the shameless activities of the guests, who are rarely on their best behavior. Prepare to be moved, too, by his candor about what it’s like to toil in a highly demanding service industry at the luxury level, where people expect to get what they pay for (and often a whole lot more). Employees are poorly paid and frequently abused by coworkers and guests alike, and maintaining a semblance of sanity is a daily challenge. Along his journey Tomsky also reveals the secrets of the industry, offering easy ways to get what you need from your hotel without any hassle. This book (and a timely proffered twenty-dollar bill) will help you score late checkouts and upgrades, get free stuff galore, and make that pay-per-view charge magically disappear. Thanks to him you’ll know how to get the very best service from any business that makes its money from putting heads in beds. Or, at the very least, you will keep the bellmen from taking your luggage into the camera-free back office and bashing it against the wall repeatedly.




House of Hospitality


Book Description

"A great many of these notes were not written for publication, but for my own self in moments of trouble and in moments of peace and joy." Dorothy Day's reflections-written on the fly over five hectic years-reveal not only the beginnings of the Catholic Worker Movement, but the mind of a heroic woman as she responds to the demands of faith. Now back in print after seventy-five years, House of Hospitality is packed with stories of sacrifice and kindness, strikes and protests, hunger and soup lines, the rough reality of tenement life, and the foul odor of poverty. "I do penance through my nose continually," Dorothy wrote. And yet, as she said, "Our lives are made up of little miracles day by day." Dorothy Day and her fellow workers were "poor for the poor," as Pope Francis has exhorted, and the early years of this Gospel-driven moment have much to teach us about how we can live, today, with a heart for others. "Love and ever more love," Dorothy said, "is the only solution to every problem that comes up."




The Hospitality Commands


Book Description

Hospitality plays crucial roles in encouraging unity, evangelism, and many spiritual gifts in the local church. Strauch shows the Scripture's teaching along with practical hints that he and his wife have learned over the years.




Just Imagine


Book Description

In our everyday lives, we are often expected to offer hospitality to others we meet, yet for Christians and church leaders, hospitality can mean so much more. What is hospitality in the spiritual sense? Why do we extend God’s hospitality? Who is called to offer this hospitality? And how do we live out God’s hospitality? Just Imagine: The Joy of God’s Hospitality Overflowing with Loving Relationships answers these questions and more about Christian hospitality. Author Dianne B. Salter explains how this is not a program; it is a Christian lifestyle, especially in the church, the body of Christ. God’s hospitality must be supported and promoted by the pastor and by the church governing group. But it will be effective only if the people in the pews take leadership, advocate for it, and sincerely practice this new lifestyle. Based on scriptural directives, Just Imagine advocates friendship evangelism, building relationships, and creating ministries for those not currently a part of the church. All chapters end with Hospitality Challenges that help individuals and the church to just imagine what they might become if they truly practiced God’s hospitality.