Home. It’s as much a feeling as it is a place. Born of particularity—that remembered smell, those quirky rules, my people, the squeal of that door—yet charged with a more universal longing, what begins in the real for all of us morphs, for most of us, into the realm of dream.

There’s nothing especially simple about home. Even for those with idyllic childhoods, it eventually becomes ground for negotiation. Roots need contending with. Agency loves a foil.

“You don’t have a home until you leave it,” wrote James Baldwin. “And then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”

Yet all of us need a home. “Life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base,” said the father of attachment theory, John Bowlby. What happens when our foundations fracture or change into something new and unrecognizable? What happens if they reject us, or we can no longer fully abide them?

Exile may be the word of the age. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development counted 653,104 homeless Americans in 2023, the highest year on record. Unsheltered homelessness in Canada has increased by 88 percent since 2018. More than 280 million people—roughly one out of every thirty people on earth—currently live in a country in which they were not born. Our world’s refugee population is at a record high. Twenty-six percent of American young adults say they are estranged from their fathers.

These many varied experiences of displacement are happening, at least in the West, in the foreground of a sunset in shared givens. From the disintegration of a shared moral code, to a dissolution of national identity, to the replacement of shared physical space by fleeting digital space, to a loss of shared facts and the polarization of language itself, our human task often feels as basic as it does impossible: We need to build rafts for ourselves and a few others while being rushed along rapids of change, unsure whether there is a fatal waterfall ahead or simply another bend. Sometimes our rafts are built from the memories of institutional knowledge. Increasingly they are not.

Much has been written on this “cut-flower existence” and the gravitational pulls to which it makes us vulnerable: political idolatry, various forms of nationalism, pride and isolation, an inability to commit. This issue of Comment continues some of that analysis. But we also want to persuade you that thrashing about for a false sense of security is not the only option for those feeling rootless and ill at ease. Exile, it turns out, can be a tutor of hospitality. Homelessness—be it literal, political, ecclesial, or vocational—may be the best training for the kind of homemaking we now need. . . .