The legacy of Christian mission seems beyond dispute. Western churches carried imperialist and racist assumptions as they evangelized and encouraged the formation of indigenous churches. Amid those realities a different sensibility took root. As the history of Virginia Theological Seminary illustrates, missionaries who were alumni adapted to contextual circumstances in ways that challenged Western presumptions. Mission encouraged cosmopolitan ties featuring mutuality and reciprocity. The path to such relations was not straight nor always readily taken. Yet, over the seminary's two-hundred-year history, the cosmopolitan direction has become evident on several continents. As missionaries came home, and leaders and students from abroad visited the seminary, the ideal of cosmopolitan relations spread. It became evident as mission churches took indigenous form and control. It was reinforced as Western churches explored the dimensions of social justice. American theological education affirmed the reality of diversity and recast its pedagogies in appreciative ways. This book traces an epic shift in mission and theological education measured by the rise of cosmopolitanism in the life of Virginia Theological Seminary.

The philosopher and author of Beyond Blood Identities offers a new paradigm of persona freedom and moral self-possession. As a Jamaican immigrant arriving in the United States at the age of twenty, Jason Hill noticed how often Americans identified themselves in terms of race and ethnicity. He observed, for example, the reluctance of West Indians to joins 'black causes' for fear of losing their identity. He began to ask himself what sort of world he wanted to live in, a quest that in time led him to the idea of the cosmopolitan. In Becoming a Cosmopolitan, Jason D. Hill argues that we need a new understanding of the self. He revives the idea of the cosmopolitan, the person who identifies the world as home. Arguing for the right to forget where we came from, Hill proposes a new moral cosmopolitanism for the new millennium.

This book expands understanding of cosmopolitan education that has the potentialto cultivate deliberative pedagogical encounters in universities. The authorsargue that cosmopolitan education in itself is an act of engaging with strangeness,otherness, difference and inclusion/exclusion. What follows is the engenderingof inclusive human encounters in which freedom and rationality – guidedby co-operative, co-existential and oppositional acts of resistance – can be exercised.The chapters centre around the enactment of universal hospitality, unconditionalengagement, difference, intercultural learning, democratic justice andopenness to develop a robust and reflexive defence of cosmopolitan education.This book will appeal to scholars of cosmopolitan education as well as democraticand inclusive education.

In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological analysis of the cosmopolitan implications of globalization. Beck draws extensively on empirical and theoretical analyses of such phenomena as migration, war and terror, as well as a range of literary and historical works, to weave a rich discursive web in which analytical, critical and methodological themes intertwine effortlessly. Contrasting a ‘cosmopolitan vision’ or ‘outlook’ sharpened by awareness of the transformative and transgressive impacts of globalization with the ‘national outlook’ neurotically fixated on the familiar reference points of a world of nations-states-borders, sovereignty, exclusive identities-Beck shows how even opponents of globalization and cosmopolitanism are trapped by the logic of reflexive modernization into promoting the very processes they are opposing. A persistent theme running through the book is the attempt to recover an authentically European tradition of cosmopolitan openness to otherness and tolerance of difference. What Europe needs, Beck argues, is the courage to unite forms of life which have grown out of language, skin colour, nationality or religion with awareness that, in a radically insecure world, all are equal and everyone is different.