Retracing My Footsteps in the City of Saints (#6b): A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Catholic: Part 2 – by Eugenia Geisel

November 1, 2017 By Guest Contributor

This is the final post 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, a fourth on St. Albert Chmielowski, a fifth on St Maximilian Kolbe, and a sixth on Pope St John Paul... Read more

Luther and me: thoughts for Reformation Day on its 500th anniversary

October 31, 2017 By Justin Tse

I remember the first time I learned about Martin Luther. My dad came home after a night class at the Berkeley seminary and started talking about his church history class. He said something about this guy, Martin Luther, he had learned about, and I was so sure that he had made a mistake. Junior, right? I said. My second grade teacher had taught us what Martin Luther King Jr meant; it meant that his dad’s name was Martin Luther King Senior. It took my... Read more

Abba Francis

October 4, 2017 By Justin Tse

Today on the New Calendar is the Feast of Our Venerable Father among the Saints Francis of Assisi. One of the advantages of being in communion with the Latin Church is that while we insist on our autonomy, we also do not need to do all the typical hand-wringing about whether their saints are holy. Granted, there has been quite a bit of discussion in contemporary theology about whether Francis and his followers are worth celebrating; did their philosophers, for... Read more

My pilgrimage for Pokrov last year

October 3, 2017 By Justin Tse

On September 30, 2016, I got on a Greyhound from Chicago up to Ann Arbor. A Byzantine Catholic friend had promised to drive me up to Brampton, Ontario from there, and that night, his family and I packed into a car and made the trek up to Canada. We were in Brampton to attend the consecration of St Elias Church. My spiritual father had a lot of history with that place; it has long been the heart of liturgical reform... Read more

Grounding theologies: owning my personhood three years out from the Umbrella Movement

September 29, 2017 By Justin Tse

A day after the Umbrella Movement began on 28 September 2014, I sat down to write something about it; it has now been three years. What I did not realize is how much this moment would alter my consciousness as a person. What I wrote on 29 September 2014 became a blog post on Catholic social teaching in Hong Kong democracy, which then turned into a talk that I gave at the University of Washington, which then became a peer-reviewed publication,... Read more

More reflections on the Internet, thanks to Zoë Quinn’s new book

September 28, 2017 By Justin Tse

I just finished reading Zoë Quinn’s very new book Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate. Readers on Catholic and Orthodox Internet – which I suppose might be taken as the given cyber-location of this blog, about which I reflected in my previous post – might be forgiven for missing the reference, though I think that excuse is removed by the mainstreaming of the phenomenon of Gamergate, especially in the events... Read more

Online humiliation and the pedagogy of the Holy Cross

September 26, 2017 By Justin Tse

Many years ago, I sent a note to a person who was a mentor of sorts to me in high school. He was a Holy Cross priest, and I had gone to a high school run by the Congregation of Holy Cross; he taught me creative writing, and together, we founded a literary magazine in the high school called Sea Changes to highlight the transfiguring power of creative writing. It was September 14 that year, and having finally started to take... Read more

‘Do you know why Hannah was so hurt?’: reflections on the Holy Ancestors

September 9, 2017 By Justin Tse

The story of Hannah that opens the Prophecy of Samuel has been one of my favourites since I was a child. Unable to have children, Hannah is mocked by everyone around her. Her husband Elkanah, described as an all-around stand-up and devout guy, is actually kind of a jerk: he takes on a second wife Peninnah, who provokes Hannah to tears on account of her closed womb. Elkanah’s cruelty, by contrast, is magnified by its lack of intention: sure, he... Read more

And I, I did not even know it: on the Nativity of the Theotokos

September 8, 2017 By Justin Tse

Last night, I walked to Great Vespers for the Nativity of the Theotokos at the temple in Richmond. Much as I love the Theotokos (doubtless, one day I will have to be psychoanalyzed because of it), I have many things to do on weekdays, so I had thought that I would not go. But then, I decided at the last minute to go, and when one decides to go to things on a whim, one does not necessarily have the requisite... Read more

Geography, the writing of the earth: reflections for the beginning of the Byzantine Year

September 1, 2017 By Justin Tse

I have a PhD in geography, so it follows that I should have something to say on this Day for the Protection of Our Natural Environment. It is, after all, a big day for our churches: since 1989, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople has rung in the new Byzantine year on September 1, and since the publication of the Bishop of Rome’s encyclical Laudato Si’ in 2015, the Latin Church has joined in the fun. Those who know something about geography – the writing (graphos)... Read more