Podcast: On the Catholicism of “Daredevil”

Last updated on: November 22, 2016 at 7:51 pm By Matthew Tan

Readers may be aware that, periodically, The Divine Wedgie gets together with lecturers at Campion College Australia to discuss the theological, philosophical and literary aspects of particular artifacts of pop culture. These include discussions on the Richard Linklater movie Boyhood and the Netflix original series Stranger Things. This time, the Divine Wedgie got together again with Dr. Colin Dray, Lecturer in Literature at the college, to discuss the Catholic symbols and tropes in another Netflix original series, Daredevil. With the lapsed Catholicism of Matthew Murdoch, the frequenting of... Read more

Things Themselves: Phenomenology After Trump

Last updated on: November 15, 2016 at 5:47 am By Matthew Tan

Or WWJD, as in “What Would Jean (Baudrillard) Do?” More on this later, but first, to the “things themselves”, which was a phrase coined by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. In the twentieth century, Husserl was credited with the founding of the philosophical subdiscipline called phenomenology, broadly understood as the study of the depth of meaning found in the experience of things in and of themselves. By that, one means an experience of things not mediated by anything that could... Read more

The Vicious Ascetic

Last updated on: November 7, 2016 at 8:21 am By Matthew Tan

In the Christian tradition asceticism, or the deliberate denial of certain pleasures and appetites, is considered by many to be the path towards greater holiness and sanctity. The more one denies oneself, the stronger the indicators that the person undertaking such denials of the appetites, and the eschewing of pleasure, is on the path towards sainthood (of the non-canonised variety). Generally, this is a correct orientation for the Christian to take to a life of asceticism. Having said that, this... Read more

Money as Sacrifice

Last updated on: November 1, 2016 at 7:14 am By Matthew Tan

The convention in this world is to see money as “the bottom line”, a tangible reality as firm as the ground beneath our feet. Given that we have given money such a determinative quality, we are often told to accept the evaluation of a venture solely by reference to the venture’s cash-flow. In attributing such qualities to money, many often forget another attribution of money, that of a fundamentally “tainted thing” (Luke 16:11). It is not a passing reference by... Read more

The Attention & The Ecstasy

Last updated on: October 25, 2016 at 6:00 am By Matthew Tan

In a previous post, mention was made of the nexus linking the subgenre of EDM (Electronic Dance Music), the practice of dance, the attempts to transcend our limitations within the confines of our bodies, and communing with the divine. However, there was in that post an embedded presumption, something that remained unexplored until a discussion on music came up in a dinner conversation earlier this month. Indeed, this presumption is what undergirds the notion that dance functions as a bridge... Read more

Available Now: Campion College on “Stranger Things”

Last updated on: October 18, 2016 at 6:29 am By Matthew Tan

The Divine Wedgie’s Matthew Tan got together with Dr. Colin Dray, Lecturer in Literature at Campion College Australia, to discuss the surprise Netflix hit, Stranger Things, described in the discussion as that “8 episode homage to the 1980s”. The wide-spanning discussion brings together threads of the core disciplines of the college, namely Theology, Philosophy, Literature and a little bit of (more recent) History, and focuses them on various aspects of the series from the characters to the plot to distribution of the... Read more

How Should Christians Respond to “the Feels”?

Last updated on: October 11, 2016 at 5:59 am By Matthew Tan

The feels… Nowadays, it is used to describe two things at once. At one, more literal, level, it is used to describe your feelings, your emotional state. However, as a whole slew of “Right in the Feels” memes is demonstrating, it is also, at a more figurative level, referring to some part of your person that you either cannot express in words, or are just too lazy to find the words for. It is a deep, pondering part of... Read more

Desire & Idolatry: After Debating

Last updated on: October 4, 2016 at 6:33 am By Matthew Tan

Elections come, elections go, but the media stands firm forever… Whilst another electoral debate has concluded in the United States, it will be a while before another televised debate will show up somewhere else in the world. The people may be different, but the format is pretty much the same. Chances are that each one will come up with different sounding spiels that, under the surface, have the kind of manufactured pre-packaged constants – that those in the Frankfurt School... Read more

Emmanuel Mounier: On Bodies & the Abstracting Power of Machines

Last updated on: September 23, 2016 at 9:43 am By Matthew Tan

In a tutorial in political philosophy class at Campion College Australia last week, students were introduced to passages from Personalism by Emmanuel Mounier, one of the founding figures of that movement called French Personalism. This was the early twentieth-century intellectual faction which nourished the thought of Jacques Maritain, Nikolai Berdayev and, decades later, Paul Riceour and Karol Wojtyla. Mounier’s book, written in the 1930s, could be speaking to our current postmodern and postsecular age. This is particularly the case in a chapter... Read more

Catfishing, the Synthetic Self & Confession

Last updated on: September 15, 2016 at 9:23 am By Matthew Tan

Readers of the Catholic blogosphere would by now be acquainted with Chase Padusniak (of Jappers and Janglers and Catholic Vote) and his experience of ThisCatholicGirl, an online personality that quite quickly became the object of adulation of Catholic millenials, both in America and overseas. As the account by Padusniak revealed, ThisCatholicGirl also did not exist. More accurately, she proved to be anything but what her online persona indicated. Padusniak was the victim of “Catfishing”. The gravity of this episode was... Read more