Today is Forgiveness Sunday. For us in the Byzantine churches, today is the start of the Great Fast, what the Latins have called ‘Lent’ (which is a word that simply means ‘Spring’). It is also known as Cheesefare Sunday, as it is the day that we give up dairy, eggs, wine, and (olive) oil as we proceed into the Fast. Last night, I spent some time writing up some of my very convoluted and detailed thoughts about a letter that... Read more
The coming of the American evangelist Franklin Graham to headline the Festival of Hope in Vancouver has caused quite a stir in my hometown – and therefore, in the local church there too. A letter claiming to be an ecumenical statement of protest against Graham has been floating around since yesterday; this statement has garnered a fair bit of press in the Vancouver Sun, the Washington Post, and Christianity Today. A second letter from Streams of Justice was issued on the same... Read more
This is the fifth in a series of posts entitled Retracing My Footsteps in the City of Saints by Eugenia Geisel for Eastern Catholic Person on her experience of encountering the saints in Kraków as part of the ordinary supernatural during World Youth Day. There are four previous posts, one on the Black Madonna, a second on Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko, a third on Holy Faustyna and the Divine Mercy Devotion, and a fourth on St. Albert Chmielowski. Eugenia is an undergraduate at the University of Washington... Read more
I haven’t written for a while, though again this is not due as much to lack of interest or material as it is lack of time. I have been teaching two courses in Asian American studies at Northwestern, one of which is very heavily populated by students more intelligent than me (the other one is less populated, but still with students of the same caliber). In the effort to make them stupider (this is a goal of my teaching, as... Read more
There is a post for which I got a good deal of flak that I wrote shortly after the elections in 2016. Some people accused me of being partisan, to which I replied that I’ve always been open about being on the Left in a broad way, although the fragmentation of the Left for the last forty years means that I, like many honest people on the Left, am trying to figure out what exactly it means to be on... Read more
Around my sophomore year in high school, my uncle told me that his neighbor was a lawyer. I had wanted to become a lawyer ever since my father planted it in my head in middle school that I was good at English. Before that, I had actually wanted to become a doctor, not because I’m Chinese and my parents wanted me to, but because I had this coloring book for human anatomy, and I liked it. I heard about residencies,... Read more
Yesterday, after posting my 3,744-too-many-words on the autonomy of Eastern Catholics in response to Chase Padusniak’s primer and quoting the Ethiopian Catholic guy who said to me a few months ago, Catholics on the Eastside, we gotta stick together – I went out to see that guy because he had invited me to the local Ethiopian Catholic mission’s Christmas Vigil. Unfortunately, as I approached Uptown in Chicago, I pulled out my phone and saw that he had messaged me quite a bit.... Read more
Chase Padusniak has done it again with another hit piece. This time, he’s written a primer on his Patheos blog on the Eastern Catholic Churches, and it is a very interesting piece especially for our interlocutors in the Latin Church to get to know Eastern Catholics on our own terms. Of course, it is nakedly opportunistic of me to use his post as an opportunity to dish out some of my own thoughts on Eastern Catholicism on my own Patheos blog, but... Read more
It’s Theophany today, and that has me thinking about the holy water that is sanctified through the Great Blessing of the Waters. There’s a Cantonese friend of mine who is an evangelical Protestant who is obsessed with holy water. He likes to go to my home temple in Richmond to drink it during coffee hour. I have never witnessed him gulping it down because I am usually at coffee hour itself (the parish hall is across the parking lot), but... Read more
I am so glad to have gone to the Vigil of Theophany at our local Orthodox Church in America (OCA) cathedral here in Chicago. We were a small crowd, as Vigil services usually go, but the kliros was simply incredible (as usual) – to the point where the guy behind me started humming along, and I started catching myself singing along. I usually don’t know what to do in an Orthodox temple when nobody is singing, but I felt the... Read more
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