Human Rights, Pandemic, and Cosmopolitanism: A Christian Cosmopolitanism for the Post-Pandemic Anthropocene

This article aims to endorse Christian cosmopolitanism, which deconstructs cosmopolitanism of the strong and victors and at the same time reconstructs new solidarity of the least. The post-Cold War globalization, inheriting a series of global antagonism and crimes against humanity from the short but deeply wounded twentieth century, faced a new challenge of integration and fragmentation. This globalization resulted in massive global subaltern in Gayatri Spivak’s term, which requested that globalization be more ethical-moral to take care of the new global subaltern, the least, or minjung. Now the precedented pandemic demands cosmopolitan care and charity for humanity. Christian cosmopolitanism at the outset of Christianity was an inverted cosmopolitanism. Christian inverse cosmopolitanism did not pursue the unification of the empire but undifferentiated care and charity for the least in the enveloped life-world. Three discourses will be argued for inverse cosmopolitanism: spirituality for the least, the spirituality of hospitality, and spirituality of pilgrimage.