more than just being pleasant, but rather that Christians were expected to take strangers and itinerants into their homes as well as to care for and nurse the sick and the dying. “SCRIPTURE READER IN A NIGHT REFUGE” is a scene from the nineteenth century that recalls the charitable Christian institutions of ptochia and xenodochia that arose in the church some 1,500 years earlier. (Gustave Doré) The first hospital was built by St. Basil in Caesarea in Cappadocia about A.D. 369. It was one of “a