Namsoon Kang Quotes

I fully recognize there is an urgent need for constructing the _strategic we-nes-in-sameness_ and promoting the _solidarity of sameness_. The sheer realization of the inextricable interconnectedness of I-ness/me-ness and we-ness/us-ness is the round for an authentic solidarity with one another in spite of and regardless of the difference.

now the question we must ask is...what kind of _practices_ [theology] motivates, what kind of _gaze_ onto others, the guest, the new arrivant, it offers us to carry with us; _not_ who my neighbors are _but_ to whom I am being a neighbor.

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

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.

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––what I call a _cosmopolitan gaze_.

The politics of trans-identity seeks to move from the _politics of singular identity_ to the _politics of multiple solidarities_ across various identities without abandoning one's personal attachments and commitments to the group that one finds significant.

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

the overall theme of theology can be twofold: the search for meaning and the responsibility one has to the others.

Cosmopolitanism starts from the _singular_ individual rather than the _faceless_ collective

the cosmopolitan gaze of planetary love and hospitality _is_ what constitutes being _religious_.

Cosmopolitan discourse is in a way a response to the issue of solidarity. Although the precondition for solidarity can be a _community_, solidarity requires more intentional commitment and performance than does community.

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

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

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

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.

I want to affirm that thinking and living, knowing and doing, theory and practice intersect.

Cosmopolitan theology is a theology for _the impossible_.

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 that dreaming an _impossible_ world, is itself the task of theologies and that the disparity between _the world-as-it-is_ (reality) and _the world-as-it-ought-to-be_ (ideality) is where a prophetic call_ comes in.

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.