Dormition posts on the Theotokos

Last updated on: July 31, 2017 at 6:43 pm By Justin Tse

The Dormition Fast begins tomorrow. I figure that with all this stuff I’ve been writing and thinking about what Eugenia Xavier Geisel calls the ‘everyday supernatural’ – not only in my Eastern Catholic church, but also in evangelicalism, the Christian oikoumēnē more broadly, the spaces of academia, and my Cantonese orientation as a folk phenomenological approach to the real world – it might be an idea to write through my relationship with the Most Holy Theotokos. So I think I might. Maybe... Read more

Le surnaturel is a mess: everyday musings on the Feast of St Ignatius

Last updated on: July 31, 2017 at 4:55 pm By Justin Tse

My spiritual father is a Jesuit, and he has invited me as well as this blog’s resident Latin Catholic guest contributor Eugenia Geisel to sing the Vespers of St Ignatius with him at the Eastern Catholic temple in Richmond. I suppose this means that I should be good at what they call ‘Ignatian spirituality.’ I am terrible at it. It’s not that I don’t have the imagination for the spirituality of St Ignatius of Loyola; it might be that I have... Read more

On the ‘West’: a perverse defence of politics

Last updated on: July 27, 2017 at 4:27 pm By Justin Tse

There has been a considerable amount of popular interest in the concept of the ‘West’ in recent weeks because of Donald Trump’s speech in Poland about it. From Peter Beinart’s denunciation of the inherent racism of the concept to the resharing of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s 2016 piece in The Guardian arguing that the ‘West’ itself does not exist, accusations of ‘Eurocentrism’ are floating around afresh. It is not my intention here to give a takedown of Trump’s Warsaw speech, much as I promised a Polish Dominican a few... Read more

Being Eastern Catholic, writing about evangelicals

Last updated on: July 26, 2017 at 1:53 pm By Justin Tse

I am Eastern Catholic, and I have spent the last week writing about the Protestant news cycle. As most of my friends and some of my readers will be able to corroborate, I am given to a bit of internal psychological ambivalence when I do such things, although I can’t seem to help myself from doing them. In this post, I will try to present myself as even more of an overthinking psychoanalytical basketcase. Much of my personal journey into... Read more

As one adopted into the Church of Kyiv

Last updated on: July 24, 2017 at 10:52 pm By Justin Tse

The first time that I ever stepped foot in an Eastern Catholic temple was for a retreat on the Umbrella Movement; as I recounted, I accidentally came in through the deacon door. After the retreat, a few of us – mostly younger Chinese evangelicals in Vancouver – came up to the deacon door, where the Eastern Jesuit who became my spiritual father began to introduce us to Eastern Catholicism by talking us through the iconostasis. He told us that the... Read more

Retracing My Footsteps in the City of Saints (#6a): A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Catholic: Part 1 – by Eugenia Geisel

Last updated on: July 22, 2017 at 5:02 pm By Guest Contributor

This is the sixth 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, and a fifth on St Maximilian Kolbe. Eugenia recently graduated from the University of Washington... Read more

Richard Mouw and the Chinese church

Last updated on: July 22, 2017 at 2:14 am By Justin Tse

At least among the friends I keep, the piece that the Reformed evangelical theologian Richard Mouw wrote for his Religion News Service column last week on Christians in China did him no favors. I alluded to this, alongside the news about Josh Harris’s new documentary, when I was trying to contextualize Eugene Peterson’s being for same-sex marriage before he was against it earlier this week in his evangelical place. In keeping with the theme of disparateness in evangelical newsiness over the last week,... Read more

‘Today, I am going to teach you how to fall in love’: on I Kissed Dating Goodbye

Last updated on: July 19, 2017 at 9:00 am By Justin Tse

A Protestant friend of mine told me recently that I have ‘an oedipal thing with Protestantism’ and cannot seem to stay in my own ecclesial lane, as much as I try. After writing yesterday’s post on Eugene Peterson, I can confirm that his psychoanalysis is right on the money. Today, I am going to give into more temptation and write about my experience with the homeschooling poster child/ex-megachurch pastor/Regent College student Joshua Harris’s cult classic, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The timing is especially... Read more

Eugene Peterson (and ‘evangelicalism,’ more generally) in a world made up only of intentions

Last updated on: July 18, 2017 at 11:39 am By Justin Tse

Eugene Peterson is a Protestant pastor and theologian. He is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (PCUSA) and is professor emeritus of spiritual theology at Regent College, a graduate school of Christian studies in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the translator of the bestselling paraphrase of the Holy Scriptures called The Message; he is also the author of a number of works in Christian spiritual practice, including A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Reversed Thunder, and a series of five... Read more

‘Dead white guys,’ Asian style

Last updated on: July 11, 2017 at 5:55 pm By Justin Tse

Among Sam Rocha’s essays in Tell Them Something Beautiful, one of the ones that most resonates with me is titled ‘Dead White Guys,’ a revision of a 2012 piece he had put into First Things. In it, Sam recounts his relationship to the philosophical and literary canon of ‘dead white guys,’ some of whom are still alive. He says that when he was in high school and college, he worked really hard to read a bunch of these guys, and (descending into lawyer drama... Read more