This is the fifth post in a series on why I blog with no authority. Previous posts include the first post explaining why I needed to write this series, a second post on how I started out blogging without any concept of what the public sphere was, a third post about being my alter-ego called Chinglican, and a fourth post about reflecting on Catholic social teaching with the democracy movement before the Umbrella Movement was ever in the works. About a year into writing... Read more
One of the most memorable things for me at the beginning of this Great Fast was attending Forgiveness Vespers at the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) cathedral in Chicago. The community there is so intimate that some even remembered seeing me around for some of the other feasts; this is because the OCA cathedral is perhaps the most accessible place that I know by public transit to attend some of the feasts. As vespers ended, the bishop transitioned to the... Read more
I had an inkling as I went into this year’s Great Fast that things were going to be interesting. Last year, my spiritual father had explained to our temple that the origins of the Great Fast lay in the catechumenate, the people who were being taught so that they could join the Church. I was the only catechumen at the temple, so it was particularly meaningful to me. It turns out that the Great Fast started out as a catechumens’... Read more
This is the fourth post in a series on why I blog with no authority. Previous posts include the first post explaining why I needed to write this series, a second post on how I started out blogging without any concept of what the public sphere was, and a third post about being my alter-ego called Chinglican. This really should have been a post that should be about the Hong Kong election that happened today in which Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor was... Read more
When I was an evangelical, one of the things that everyone kept harping about when conducting Bible studies or preaching or other forms of Christian education was that we had to apply the Bible to our lives. In time, I will perhaps blog more about this, especially when this came to a head when I was in college and I met people who were obsessed with Bill Gothard’s Institute for Biblical Life Principles. On this Feast of the Annunciation, I... Read more
This post was inspired by the convergence of three things that seemed to happen at the same time on social media, which for me is real life as far as the academy is concerned: the open letter from Professors Robert P. George and Cornel West on ‘Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression’ regarding the events at Middlebury College (I signed the letter), a spirited debate about the relevance of the academy triggered by an article on The Conversation... Read more
Because those of us in the Byzantine churches practice the Prayer of Holy Ephrem the Syrian both in our daily prayers and in the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, we are accustomed to asking the Lord and Master of our lives to drive from us the spirit of indifference, despair, lust for power, and idle chatter, as is the translation that we in the Greek-Catholic Church of Kyiv usually use according to our Divine Liturgy: An Anthology for Worship. But indifference, I... Read more
I feel like I have been basking in the Uncreated Light of Tabor on this Sunday of Holy Gregory Palamas. It’s been a rather charismatic day for me: when I took communion today, I felt a deep sense of G-d’s presence within me, and it reminded me a lot of the charismatic moments that permeated my life even before I became Eastern Catholic. Spending the day re-reading part of Palamas’s Triads, I found even more surprising insights about hesychasm and the... Read more
The Great Fast is supposed to be a yearly revisitation of one’s catechumenate, and it is more than fair to say that I am revisiting mine. It was, after all, during the Great Fast of my catechumenate that I finally stopped being unserious about my possible conversion and got serious. Much of this was because of my attendance during that Great Fast of the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete, during which the life of St Mary of Egypt... Read more
In the Byzantine churches, today is the Sunday of Holy Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessaloniki in the fourteenth century. Among many things, Palamas is often seen as the guy who centered for the Byzantine churches the practice of hesychasm, the stilling of the heart as the intellect (Greek nous) enters into the heart through the negative repetition of the Jesus Prayer to meet with G-d there. Popularly speaking, what seems to mark a conventional conception of hesychasm is that it’s a negative tradition... Read more
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