Eastern Catholic Person
It’s out in English! Greek Catholic theological reflections as Asian American theology!
The magazine Часопис Патріярхат, which is the journal of record for our beloved Greek-Catholic Church where intellectuals, clergy, and lay people disseminate ideas, invited me to contribute a piece last winter on my intellectual journey in this Kyivan Church of ours. The Ukrainian version, brilliantly translated by the editor Volodymyr Moroz, has been widely read throughout our church, and now it’s gone online in English. The expanded version with footnotes will also be published in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies quite soon.
I’m so pleased with how this piece turned out. In it, I theorize how the term ‘uniatism,’ which refers to a perverse kind of assimilation of one church by another, is related to ‘the model minority,’ which is the deception by which contemporary Asian America is miseducated. The anti-colonial impulses of our church’s practice, I show, converted me away from both; the irony, I suggest, is that it took becoming a ‘uniate’ to cure me of my uniatism. The result is the exploration of a theology that attends to the movements of the heart, grounded in the love by which the world is truly constituted. In that spirit, I make that immortal line from Leehom’s song 心跳 ‘Heartbeat’ my epigraph: ‘你的眼神 充滿美麗 帶走我的心跳. The spirit of your eyes flooded with beauty leads my heartbeat away.’
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