cosmopolitan

Theological discourses function in various ways as sites of contestation and resistance, of forming new religious and personal identities, and of building solidarities. Theological discourses that theologians produce, disseminate, and teach in academia are not simply objective interpretations and neutral reflections on the world and the church in it. Instead theological discourses are productions of and for the world and the church that we live in

How can one maintain a theological confidence in what one claims to be _true_ while acknowledging the existence of multiple religions that also claim to be _true_?

Cosmopolitanism emphasizes and is grounded in a _singular relationality between and among people

Cosmopolitan theology is a theology for _the impossible_.

Religion is about hospitality and responsibility, and about neighbor/enemy-love-as-self-love in a Christian term that requires one to turn a new _gaze_ onto others___hat I call a _cosmopolitan gaze_.

Religion is about hospitality, solidarity, and responsibility or it is nothing at all.

Cosmopolitanism has offered me an ethical perspective and a conceptual framework with which to read the _signs of our times_ as a theologian and intellectual who has a public responsibility for constantly offering a way to engage in this rapidly changing public world.

Cosmopolitanism promotes a sense of new _we-ness as regarding every individual human being as a citizen of the cosmos. However, the _we-cosmic-citizens_ are not to promote the _we-ness-in-sameness_, but rather the we-ness-in-alterity_.Unlike the solidarity-in-sameness, cosmopolitan _solidarity-in-alterity_ celebrates the singularity and difference of each individual human being while not denying the historical necessity of the strategic construction of _we_ to challenge the very sociopolitically imposed category

Theological discourse can be, in and of itself, a form of identity and solidarity.

What does it mean to be human, to continue to live as human, to remain _faithful_ to the Divine while living in a cultural, sociogeopoltical, and religious world where power disparity between/among humans based on religious world where power disparity between/among humans based on their nationality, citizenship, gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, religion and so forth still prevails? The act of _theologizing_ for me involves responding to these questions and stimulating the practice of liberating and enlarging human possibility in our daily reality.

The time and space in which I have been working on this cosmopolitan project have convinced me that the disparity between the ideal of cosmopolitan theology and the current sociopolitical configuration of hospitality, welcoming others, unconditional forgiveness, is itself a _prophetic call_ to which we all have to respond___s humans, as person of faith. The _real_ is always about calculation and conditionality, whereas the _ideal_ of cosmopolitan theology is about incalculability, unconditionality, and planetarity of the _world-as-it-ought-to-be_. Therefore, the disparity between the reality and the ideality is not a space for despair but a space where one's sense of prophetic call_ and passion for _the impossible_ must come in.

_For what ends_ does one claim cosmopolitanism? _Whose interest_ does it serve?

The question is not, therefore, _whether_ a theory is grand or small, or whether it is universal/global or particular/local, but _what function_ a theory plays and _whose interest_ it serves.

I believe _cosmopolitanism_ can be an effective discourse with which to advocate a politics of _transidentity_ of overlapping interests and heterogeneous or hybrid subjects in order to challenge conventional notions of exclusive belonging, identity and citizenship.

cosmopolitan theology that longs for the Kindom of God seeks to recover its revolutionary universalizing ethos in terms of hospitality, neighbor-love, and multiple solidarities that one can see in Jesus' teaching and ministry, without any imperialist, kyriarchcal, hierarchical implications

Cosmopolitan theology affirms and radicalizes the belief that the Divine creates each and every human being as equal to every one else as a _citizen-of-the-cosmos and that no one is either superior or inferior to the other.

Theology should be a discourse that helps the sociopolitical approach to justice to maintain its human face and not to become impersonal.

I believe theology should be about one's way of life, a kind of gaze into onesself and others, and a mode of one's profound existence in the world.