Namsoon Kang Quotes

#1. The cosmopolitan gaze of planetary love and hospitality _is_ what constitutes being _religious_.

Namsoon Kang

#2. 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.

Namsoon Kang

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

Namsoon Kang

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

Namsoon Kang

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

Namsoon Kang

#6. 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.

Namsoon Kang

#7. 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.

Namsoon Kang

#8. 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.

Namsoon Kang

#9. 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.

Namsoon Kang

#10. 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.

Namsoon Kang

#11. Cosmopolitanism starts from the _singular_ individual rather than the _faceless_ collective

Namsoon Kang

#12. Cosmopolitan discourse ... provides one with a _public gaze_ with which one can relate oneself to others in a different way.

Namsoon Kang

#13. I believe recognizing the presence of the face of the other as existent, no matter who/what one is, is one of the core messages of Jesus' teaching.

Namsoon Kang

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

Namsoon Kang

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

Namsoon Kang

#16. 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

Namsoon Kang

#17. Cosmopolitan theology is a theology for _the impossible_.

Namsoon Kang

#18. Purity does not exist in any thinker, simply because one is always historically and socioculturally situated, bound, and limited, and, therefore, no one is epistemologically innocent.

Namsoon Kang

#19. 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.

Namsoon Kang

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

Namsoon Kang

#21. 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.

Namsoon Kang

#22. 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_?

Namsoon Kang

#23. Cosmopolitanism, ... , _speaks_ about the urgent need for and the significance of relocating our discourse on, ... , the scope and application of rights and justice for every singular human being regardless of the person's birth and belonging.

Namsoon Kang

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

Namsoon Kang

#25. 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.

Namsoon Kang