My first encounter with the violin was the day that I also learned about Kumon. Both were activities that my friends did. I knew them as ‘South Fremont’ things. It was a strange time in my life. I spent the first eighteen years of my life growing up in a neighborhood called Ardenwood. It was on the north side of Fremont, a suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area that had previously been five small towns but had now incorporated... Read more
When I was nine, the music teacher at our Christian school told us that we should think about joining the school band. There were lots of instruments we could play, she said – flutes, clarinets, saxophones, trumpets. My dad played the clarinet, so I didn’t want to do that, and flutes were for girls. But trumpets sounded cool. Having grown up on Hanna Barbera’s Greatest Adventure Bible films with the three cartoon archaeologists who get transported into biblical times, I had come... Read more
It is mid-Pascha, and I have not blogged for a while. But on Monday, I saw Ai Weiwei, and he reminded us that he once had a blog. It reminded me that I still have one. Blogs can be powerful things. Mine certainly is not as effective as it could be. I suspect it might be if I were more regular and entrepreneurial about it. But there are always other things to do: dishes, cooking, laundry, ironing, bathroom cleaning, sweeping,... Read more
Arise, O G-d, and judge the earth, for to you belong all the nations! In the hiatus of Holy Saturday, Pascha is anticipated. Rose petals are thrown, as the Lord arises in the secret of the empty tomb. The mystery hidden before the foundation of the world is about to be revealed. Richmond Eastern Catholic Church 東正天主教會 – Vancouver celebrates Pascha on the New Calendar. It is tonight at 10:30 pm. We are at 8700 Railway Ave in Richmond, British Columbia.... Read more
For those in Richmond/Vancouver: Our temple will be having the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete on Wednesday, March 14, 7 pm. It will last about four hours. It is the service where after doing 250 prostrations, I felt my body prostrating automatically. I heard the story of St Mary of Egypt for the first of many times and have been left contemplating the erotics of holiness. I was not taking my catechumenate seriously at the time, and my... Read more
Whenever I play hooky from my home Kyivan Church and hang out with the Latins in Chicago, I always hear about their Archdiocesan plan, ‘Renew My Church.’ From what I can tell, it’s a riff on the words of the Lord to Holy Francis of Assisi, rebuild my church, as he prayed before the cross in the church of San Damiano. Francis took the instructions literally, physically attempting to rebuild the church brick by brick. Later he learned that there was... Read more
I was talking to my friend in Vancouver about my last post, which was on how the intellectual mistakes I made about what I used to call ‘the private consensus‘ were originally made in Fremont. He told me about some of the immigration cases that his firm was handling. When some people have money, they are prone to think that they are above the law. They may think that just because they’ve been able to talk their way out of... Read more
Last weekend in the Bay Area, I was talking to one of my earliest students – this one from the Sunday school I used to teach in a small evangelical church in Fremont, California – when I realized that what had gone down at that church had scarred her as much as it had me, as well as other kids and youth from that community. It was a strange moment, one that I am still trying to process, but like... Read more
I became a self-described ‘man of god’ because I was rejected by a girl. It was a bad rejection because she was what you might call a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, at least in the way that I fantasized about it. I understand that the coiner of the term, Nathan Rabin, regrets its coinage now, as it is used to overdetermine the analysis of female characters who might actually be more fully developed in some films if only we’d watch... Read more
There are necessarily spoilers for what I am about to write. But it is fair for me to include spoilers since Lady Bird has been out for months. Please read then, whether or not you have seen Lady Bird. Lady Bird came out last autumn, but I have only just seen it. Like Lady Bird, I have been trying to become a decent writer. Because of that, I have had to discipline my prose. Having grown up evangelical, my writing tends... Read more
Eastern Catholic Person
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In