Hermeneutics concerns itself with the task of hearing afresh the communicative word – the wonder and mystery of language in and through time. Hermeneutics involves attentive listening, which Jean-Louis Chrétien evocatively describes as the “first act” of “hospitality.”1 When it comes to biblical hermeneutics, we are concerned with extending this hospitality to the biblical texts. For the SAHS, this hospitality is above all to the Word made flesh disclosed in the witness of the texts of Scripture, which Dei Verbum rightly calls the “pure and everlasting source of spiritual life.”2
