Whenever one comes to the the table for interreligous dialogue, there is what I would call an _ecumenical taboo_ that one has to comply with. The ecumenical taboo_ does not exist in a written document, but people tend to practice it around the dialogue table. One should not raise, for instance, such questions as gender justice, sexual orientation issues, religious constructions of the other, multiple forms of violence in a religious community, or religious cooperation with neo/imperialism. each religion has its own _history of sin_ that has justified and perpetuated oppression and exclusion of certain groups of people through its own religious teaching, doctrine, and practice. In order to be _nice_ and _tolerant_ to one another, interreligious dialogue has not challenged the fundamental issues of injustice that a particular religion has practiced, justified, and perpetuated in various ways. I do not disregard that most ecumenists have based interreligious dialogue on a politics of tolerance, and this has played a significant role in easing the antagonism between religions, at least among the leaders of established religions. However, we should ground an authentic ecumenism and theology of religion in a _politics of affirmation and transformation, rather than a politics of tolerance_. . Namsoon Kang
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  1. Theologians are to look to the _beyond_-community—— _beyond_ nationality; skin-color, gender; sexual orientation, citizenship, religious affiliation——because God, the Divine, who is the primary frame of reference for theologians, is for, with, in, among those individual human beings. It is to reaffirm the sheer truth: No...

  2. 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.

  3. 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...

  4. Walter Mignolo terms and articulates _critical cosmopolitanism, juxtaposing it with globalization, which is a process of "the homogeneity of the planet from above——economically, politically and culturally." Although _globalization from below_ is to counter _globalization from above_ from the experience and perspective of those who suffer...

  5. 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...

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