If there is anything I’ve learned since becoming Eastern Catholic, it is that the Holy Spirit seems to care deeply about my intellectual life. As I’ve continued to struggle in crafting a way forward as a geographer freshly re-committed to the postsecular between religious studies and Asian American studies, I’ve stumbled on a way of framing research in the academy that sounds like a fad, but has such deep moral commitments that I have been nervous about writing it off.... Read more
I remember the first time I solicited advice from a colleague – an equal, not a superego – about how I should describe what I do as an academic. Everybody in the academy has their elevator pitch about what they do, and I was having trouble narrowing mine down. I am, as I am told, interested in many things. At the time I was in trouble – and this was before the Umbrella Movement, and thus preceding my encounter... Read more
Yesterday, we dropped off our dear sister Eugenia Geisel at the train, fresh from a weekend in which she truly flattered us in Richmond by calling it her vacation, true flattery because it suggests that we are actually relaxing to be around. She, of course, came up with a message in the form of a birthday gift. Wrapped in Hello Kitty wrapping paper – her trademark since taking that trainwreck of a class with me at the University of Washington titled... Read more
I am a child of the nineties. It has been hard for me to admit this fact because I was never really plugged into the popular culture of the time, or at least so I thought. I grew up conservative, which once upon a time meant that the people I grew up with were supposed to be afraid of the popular, including of the cultures of popularity in the everyday spaces we inhabited. Conservatism at the time required an embrace... Read more
My spiritual father read my daddy issues post yesterday and began watching Hillsong videos. He instantly regret it. I won’t get into details about how he will never be able to unhear what he heard, but suffice it to say that when we pray to our Father to lead us not into temptation, our temple will never be in danger of incorporating contemporary praise and worship – which really is dominated by the Hillsong sound, whether my evangelical sisters and... Read more
It is occasionally offensive to me, when I am in a Big Mood state, to hear evangelicals reduce my conversion to Eastern Catholicism to some kind of insecure need for authority. The story goes that the world is a place of great uncertainty. Young people, like myself – or even older folks, like in Ed Stetzer’s explanation of Hank Hannegraaff’s reception into Greek Orthodoxy – are therefore craving some kind of certainty about the great life questions. Evangelicalism, with its... Read more
The following post contains spoilers for the film Ida. On the occasion of my birthday yesterday, the members of the faction of the Kyivan Psychoanalysis Study Group that I am coming to call my pop psychoanalysis posse – namely, Eugenia Geisel and Grace Yu – each independently advised me to watch a film called Ida. It was, according to Grace, one of her ‘favorite films of all time,’ which is saying a lot because she is always recommending me to watch... Read more
Yesterday, on the eve of my birthday, I offered some reflections on my mother to my wife. As most married men will know, this was a risky Freudian act. In the heart of hearts of many a couple, the Oedipal complex still remains true. All men want to marry their mothers, and all wives are horrified when they discover that they are on the receiving end of a kind of transference that has condemned them to a life sentence of being... Read more
The dream started like any other cantoring dream. I was in front, at the temple, almost certainly in Richmond. The pews, because we still have them, were populated by evangelical Protestants, mostly of the older missionary variety with the faded button down shirts, some white, some Asian, all with greying hair. In medias res, I am vaguely aware of two things. The first is that this is a chrismation, and we are about halfway into the liturgy already, preparing for... Read more
I have seen on some corners of the Internet that conservative folks are supposedly having a public meltdown about Ariana Grande’s ‘God Is a Woman.’ I suppose that ‘freaking out about a pop song’ showcases the shallowness of the movement that arguably gave us the Trump Administration and its incompetent fascism, but I must admit that I find myself disappointed by how tepid the flagship institutions of the so-called ‘Religious Right’ is taking Ariana’s latest. One avenue of analysis might... Read more
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