Anselm Min (Claremont Graduate University, USA) explored the challenges of globalization and theological responses at the 3rd Annual Bath Spa Colloquium for Global Philosophy and Religion at the Centre for Transnational Creativity and Education in association with the Global Academy for Liberal Arts sponsored by the GALA Outreach Fund.

Professor Min described the seven dimensions of globalization, the economic, environmental, political, military, religious, cultural, and humanitarian, and point out how each of these dimensions necessarily contains a dialectic of domination and liberation.  Globalization means the increasing interdependence of peoples, nations, religions, and cultures to an unprecedented degree, but interdependence among unequal agents necessarily leads to competition for power and thus to social tensions and contradictions.  From a theological point of view, globalization poses serious threats to human dignity and human solidarity; threats to dignity are threats to solidarity, and vice versa.  Christian theology, therefore, is challenged to rethink its theology, Christology, anthropology, and ecclesiology in view of the many challenges so that they can serve as bases for a radical, countercultural, prophetic critique of capitalist materialism with its addiction to the illusions of power, fame, and wealth, for appreciation of politics as a sacred vocation, for a spirituality of the civic virtue as a religious virtue, and for mobilizing spiritual resources for a solidarity that goes beyond narrow identities, a solidarity of Others at the global level.  

Professor Anselm Min is professor of religion at Claremont Graduate University, USA. He has published numerous articles on Hegel, Kierkegaard, Kant, postmodernism, Derrida, Levinas, Marion in philosophy and on various areas of systematic theology, liberation theology, religious pluralism, and globalization.  He is the author of, among others,  Paths to the Triune God, The Solidarity of Others in a Divided World, and The Dialectic of Salvation.