Sam Rocha told me recently that I am not a geographer. You are a geometer, he said. Meter precedes writing. Among the many things he has told me, this is the most recent, I think. He has actually been telling me things for a long time, from before the time we met (online, as it happened). This is because, as I’ve said before, I devoured everything on Vox Nova back in the day. Sam wrote on Vox Nova. He wrote about schooling and... Read more
On Monday, I wrote a post on Hong Kong, and I was frustrated. Perhaps the uneasiness had begun on Sunday, when I had written on St John the Wonderworker of Shanghai and San Francisco. By the end of the week, my restlessness had turned into a weeklong blog series. My uneasiness lay in the fact that I had declared that I would be using this blog for makrodiakonia, the service the church performs for the world in discerning, challenging, and even dismantling... Read more
I am finding these days that whenever I write something, I usually get pulled despite my best attempts at discipline toward unexpected rabbit trails that I feel compelled to follow. Sometimes, as I was trained since elementary school, I have a plan – an outline, a mental map, or something – that I’m trying to follow. Other times, I just begin a piece and have an idea of where I want it to go. But usually, things do not end... Read more
A few weeks ago, I was having pizza and beer with a group of people in Chicago who can perhaps be described as some of the intellectuals of the Greek-Catholic Church of Kyiv. A lot was said that I do not remember, but I do remember one of the things I said. For some reason, I was standing up either to get another slice or a refill on the beer, and as I was sitting down, I said, almost as... Read more
In my last post, I sort of let the cat out of the bag on how I’ve been translating the term 義氣, which is pronounced yi-hei in Cantonese and yiqi in Mandarin. I have been calling it the air of righteousness, with ‘righteousness’ for 義 and ‘air’ for 氣. Yi-hei 義氣 refers to an essence of a person who is considered ‘righteous’ in a sort of Chinese martial tradition, expressed at least in South China in Cantonese street tales, opera, martial arts studios,... Read more
I remember the first time I crossed the Tsing Ma Bridge from Lantau Island. I had this feeling that I had been here – Hong Kong – before, but I hadn’t. All my life, I had grown up on the West Coast, first in the San Francisco Bay Area, then in Metro Vancouver. It wasn’t until I was 24 that I took my first trip to Asia. The problem is that I should have felt like a foreigner, but I did... Read more
Though I am not from Hong Kong, it has played a central role in informing my theological, political, and intellectual practice. At the end of this post, I’ll list some of my previous writing here and elsewhere online on Hong Kong. I have to write this boldfaced introduction because when I wrote this post, it was not clear until halfway through that an integral reflection on Hong Kong theologically, politically, and intellectually is what I’m after. This is a blog post,... Read more
Over the weekend, folks at our temple in Richmond joined in the Orthodox celebration of the Holy Hierarch John Maximovitch of Shanghai and San Francisco the Wonderworker by adding his tropar, kondak, theotokion, prokeimen, and epistle reading to our Divine Liturgy. I have a hodgepodge of thoughts I want to get out about St John of Shanghai, possibly for further reflection and reworking in the future. Broadly speaking, they revolve around him being a wonderworker of the latter times, as he... Read more
I’ve written two pieces on the Trump Era that I’ve published online outside of this blog. As some of my readers (and critics) will remember, I have also made my interest in the Trump Era very apparent on this blog, as it relates to the practice of ‘makrodiakonia,’ a Byzantine Christian way of understanding how the church can serve the world by challenging its structures of injustice. The two pieces are: ‘At least we know what evangelicalism is now’ – in... Read more
The day after my chrismation – on the proper feast day of Ss Peter and Paul – I was driving, and I had a sudden feeling that I needed to be a better husband. It wasn’t in reference to anything big; marriage, after all, is about the small things. But it was also the first sudden resolve of holiness I had after my chrismation, so I think it was a pretty big deal. I noticed that the gas was running dangerously low, so... Read more
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