Quotes & Sayings About Cosmopolitanism

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. — Namsoon Kang

The cosmopolitan gaze of planetary love and hospitality _is_ what constitutes being _religious_. — Namsoon Kang

Cosmopolitanism starts from the _singular_ individual rather than the _faceless_ collective — Namsoon Kang

Although I believe identity politics '"produces limited but real empowerment for its participants," it is important to note that it contains significant problems: first, its essentialist tendency; second, its fixed _we-they_ binary position; third, its homogenization of diverse social oppression; fourth, its simplification of the complexity and paradox of being privileged and unprivileged; and fifth its ruling out of intersectional space of diverse forms of oppression in reality. — Namsoon Kang

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

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

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

The older America, until the 1890s and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American isolation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the unrelenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament. — Richard Hofstadter

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

Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade. — Peter Ackroyd

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

Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history. — Rabindranath Tagore

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

The end of Egypt's isolation turned what had been only occasional and incidental contact with the rest of the Near East into a constant and significant exchange of goods and ideas. The new cosmopolitanism introduced new forms and motifs and a growing naturalism to art. Egypt had always been receptive to immigrants, who had easily been assimilated into its culture; now even the pharaohs could marry foreigners. In addition, the increase of commerce and the emergence of a cosmopolitan urban population
at Thebes and other cities
marked the first real urbanization in Egyptian society. — Norman F. Cantor

Though the elite have been opened, and have opened themselves to the world, the world has not opened to all. Access is not the same as integration. But what is crucial is that no one is explicitly excluded. The effect is to blame non-elites for their lack of interest. As we have seen, the result of this logic is damning. The distinction between the elites and the rest of us appears to be a choice. It is cosmopolitanism that explains elite status to elites and closed-mindedness that explains those who choose not to participate. What matters are individual attributes and capacities, not durable inequalities. From this point of view, those who are not successful are not necessarily disadvantaged; they are simply those who have failed to seize the opportunities afforded by our new, open society. — Shamus Rahman Khan

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

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

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

Highly esteemed dear Professor Franck,
In these days in which by your magnanimous decision you show the world where the insane oppression of the Jews leads to, I as one of your students would not like to be missing among those who declare their sincere thanks and unlimited veneration to you, and who especially now are filled with the highest admiration by your present step and the reason given by you, and who at the same time are filled with horror that such a thing is necessary.
I am at a loss for words to express what both my wife and I always and especially now feel for you. Please remember us to your wife and chidlren and accept our sincere greetings. — Gerhard Herzberg

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

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

The present dominant values (xenophilia, cosmopolitanism, narcissistic individualism, humanitarianism, bourgeois economism, hedonism, homophilia, permissivenes, etc.) are actually anti-values - values of devirilising weakness, since they deplete a civilization's vital energies and weaken its defensive or affirmative capacities. — Guillaume Faye

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism — Bill Bryson

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

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
[As quoted in Plutarch's Of Banishment] — Socrates

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

One of the most heartening phenomena in today's Britain is the great diversity of the modern nerd - the nerd is out and proud, and while she may love 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' merchandise more than is strictly warranted, she is in every way to be cherished as an exemplar of cosmopolitanism and tolerance. — Will Self

We know that art is connected with the land, with its salt, with its smell, that outside of national culture there is no art. Cosmopolitanism - a world in which things lose their color and form, and words lose their significance. We love in our past all that we consider native, wonderful and fair. — Ilya Ehrenburg

One should regard one's religious or denominational affiliation as a point of departure, a point of entry, not the point of arrival because on cannot confine God to a particular religion or faith tradition, and therefore should not claim one's exclusive ownership of God. Regarding one's religious or denominational affiliation as accidentality; not as inevitability, is important in religious discourse and practice because such a sense of accidentality of one's affiliation allows a space of alterity of reciprocal contestation and challenge, and a space of planetary gaze that sees others as fellow human beings, regardless. — Namsoon Kang

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

Who are theologians? What kind of self-identity could or should a theologian claim? Should a theologian be a defender or transmitter of Christian _tradition_? What if the _tradition_ itself carries a dark side, implicitly or explicitly, bounded by religious or cultural superiorism, ethnocentrism, homophobism, exclusive nationalism, sexism, racism, and so forth? What kind of _identity_ would then justify my rule as theologian? This question has been lingering in my mind throughout the time I have been working on cosmopolitan theology. it may sound simple, but for me the identity issue has been fundamental. — Namsoon Kang

We are social beings who make communities with an urgency, and it is a stern charge to make us take refuge in the lonely world of oneself ... Racism attempts to occlude our cosmopolitanism (of the songs in and out of our bones), and it often appropriates our mild forms of xenophobia into its own virulent project. Difference among peoples is something that we negotiate in our everyday interactions, asking questions and being better informed of our mutual realities. To transform difference into the body is an act of bad faith, a denial of our shared nakedness. — Vijay Prashad

Ethics and aesthetics are deeply intertwined. Art, beauty, and craft have always drawn on the self-organizing 'wild' side of language and mind. Human ideas of place and space, our contemporary focus on watersheds, become both models and metaphors. Our hope would be to see the interacting realms, learn where we are, and thereby move towards a style of planetary and ecological cosmopolitanism. — Bell Hooks

Cosmopolitanism seeks a _we_ that does not rely on the exclusion of _others_ but, instead, recognizes and confirms each other as part of the planetary _we_. The cosmopolitan _we_ is not grounded in a monolithic sameness but in a constant alterity and _ethical singularity_ of each individual human person regardless of one's national origin and belonging, religious affiliation, gender, race and ethnicity, class ability, or sexuality. — Namsoon Kang

One of the unspoken themes that I'm grappling with in Day of Honey is the relationship between violence and cosmopolitanism. It's one thing to comprehend violence as an outgrowth of ignorance, poverty, and backwardness. It's another matter entirely to confront incredible atrocities in a country with a rich civic and intellectual life. — Annia Ciezadlo

If the well-being of my loved place depends on the well-being of Earth, I have a good reason for supporting the well-being of your loved place. I have selfish as well as cosmopolitan reasons for preserving the home-places of all human beings. Cosmopolitanism becomes thicker and more potent with this realization. — Nel Noddings

Cairo and Alexandria were cosmopolitan not so much because they contained foreigners, but because the Egyptian born in them is himself a stranger to his land. — Waguih Ghali

Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation. Wherever there is a strangely-shaped mountain upon some lonely island, wherever there is a nameless kind of fruit growing in some obscure forest, patriotism insures that this shall not go into darkness without being remembered in a song. — G.K. Chesterton

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. — Namsoon Kang

That man's the best cosmopolite Who loves his native country best. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

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

We don't need this religious cosmopolitanism. It's no good. — Vladimir Zhirinovsky

Cosmopolitan theology is a theology for _the impossible_. — Namsoon Kang

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

And you can fool yourself if you're raised in New York. Think that somehow your birthplace alone makes you cosmopolitan. But it isn't true. We're rubes too. — Victor LaValle

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 — Namsoon Kang

Somebody once told me, black people, in and of themselves, are cosmopolitan. There's cosmopolitanism within the black experience. There's an incredible amount. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

New York presented a paradox. While foreigners thought of New York has the symbol of America, many Americans viewed the city with some suspicion as the country's most foreign. — Charles Emmerson

Many Americans and Western Europeans proudly trumpet the diversity of cosmopolises like London and New York without realizing that cosmopolitanism does not mean people of different skin colors all sitting around over wine at a bistro table complaining about organized religion. It means people who hold profoundly different, even mutually exclusive, beliefs and cultural norms functioning in a shared space based on toleration of disagreement. — Jonathan A.C. Brown

California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life ... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character. — J.B. Priestley

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

We need to return to the cosmopolitanism of Alexandria of yore, and marry that with the tolerance and democracy of Europe today — Ismail Serageldin

Cosmopolitan discourse emphasizes the _cosmic belonging_ of all individual human beings as the ground of our hospitality, solidarity, justice and neighbor-love. Cosmopolitan discourse is about turning a _compassionate gaze_ onto others regardless of one's nationality and citizenship, origin of birth, religion, gender; race and ethnicity, sexuality, or ability — Namsoon Kang

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

The notions of hybridity, metissage, cosmopolitanism have been deployed and reworked in order to capture the polycentric and polysemic aspects of these new configurations. — Okwui Enwezor

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

Cosmopolitan discourse ... provides one with a _public gaze_ with which one can relate oneself to others in a different way. — Namsoon Kang

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 — Namsoon Kang