Yesterday, I had an illuminating conversation with a senior colleague who showed me something about teaching about which I had not thought to articulate. She said that if I were to think about it, there are really three genres of teaching: the large lecture (200 people), the small lecture (30-40), and the seminar (5-15). The advice she gave me was to master all three as genres unto themselves; it is fine to be creative in the classroom, she suggested, but... Read more
A trusted friend told me over the last week that my writing – both published and unpublished – was beginning to feel a little restless, a little rushed, even a bit feverish in its production of joy, excitement, and enthusiasm. It would be tempting to blame this on the Asian American evangelicals with whom I hung out over the last week, but it would not be fair to impugn their spirituality. This is about me. It is not that my... Read more
This is the third post in a series on why I blog with no authority. Previous posts include the first post explaining why I needed to write this series and a second post on how I started out blogging without any concept of what the public sphere was. Around the time that I was really starting to explore the implications of reading Catholic and Orthodox theology as an Anglican layperson, a friend of mine in graduate school, Karl Persson, sent... Read more
It is to the credit of two Northwestern freshmen’s social media skills that I ended up attending their joint freshmen recital at the Bienen School of Music. The reminder from Facebook kept on coming up, and halfway into the day of preparing next quarter’s syllabi, grading furiously, and writing up a storm for my own work, I debated with myself whether I should go or not. I eventually went. One of the students was playing Beethoven’s Op. 109 sonata, which... Read more
This is the second part in a series of posts about why I blog with no authority. The first post is here. When I first started blogging around 2007, I had no sense of what a ‘public sphere’ was, although I write much the same way: my posts are too long, have too much jargon, are not very pastoral. The difference is that around the time I discovered social media and the world of blogging, I was actually discerning a... Read more
Over the weekend, I was told several times by several people from different circles with which I interact that I actually have a readership. This was surprising because I spent the weekend hanging out with Asian American evangelical Protestants. Not only do I seem to have readers from there, but I also apparently have Chinese Canadian readers in Vancouver (as well as elsewhere in Canada, I hear), and it sounds like the posts that I wrote about Franklin Graham coming... Read more
When I was doing my catechumenate, one of the things that my spiritual father got me really excited about was the Sunday of Orthodoxy. Bring all your icons, he said to all of us at the temple, assuming that we all had icons to bring; there are a bunch of Protestant seekers and Latin inquirers there, so this was a bit of a funny assumption to make, but I have always appreciated how Byzantine norms are his normal. We will bless all... Read more
This week, I have been up to my ears teaching about what is popularly called the ‘model minority,’ the blanket portrayal of Asian Americans as an upwardly mobile population because of their so-called traditional family values, which seem to resemble white American nuclear families and do not seem to feature concubines. This means that I should know something about it, and I do – it is the dominant portrayal of Asian Americans against which Asian American studies has been opposed... Read more
The origins of the Great Fast, I am told, lie in the catechumenate. In anticipation of baptism at Pascha, catechumens were instructed to fast in preparation, and as I was told during my catechumenate, the entire church began to fast in solidarity with the catechumens, using the time as a penitential season to prepare together for the celebration of the Lord’s resurrection. When we fast from vertebrates and anything that comes from a vertebrate (including the olive oil and wine... Read more
I am starting to feel like writing about the slow-moving trainwreck that is the imminent visitation of Franklin Graham to my beloved hometown of Vancouver is a habit that is difficult to quit. This is my third post in a row on the event, which is starting tomorrow. I had, of course, thought that I had said everything that I needed to say – and by ‘everything,’ I mean everything if you see the monster post that I wrote about why the main... Read more
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