I want to write a quick response to Churl’s post yesterday on love in academia. Like Churl, I too am a doctoral student. Like all doctoral students, my topic is fairly narrow: I study how Chinese Christians engage the public sphere. Like most topics, its narrowness is fairly expansive, encompassing fields I thought I’d never study. Churl thinks that, unlike other people who seem to be doing more public service than him, academic work comes down to love. This is... Read more
Qoholet in Ecclesiastes instructs us to let our words be few when making vows to God. When I agreed to this blog, I swore to myself and by myself alone that I would never bring my actual academic work to bear on my comments. The day has come to break that oath, and I am glad that it was not professed as a formal vow. My friend, Sam, has written quite the rant on a separate blog fulminating against... Read more
One of the major conversation jammers in our public discourse is that political and theological conservatism are often equated. Most people would find the equation obvious. I mean, wasn’t it a coalition of conservative evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics that has tried take back America (and other civil societies) for God, the traditional family, and small government since the 1970s? Didn’t evangelicals support the neoconservative Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II Administrations in droves? Aren’t the Tea Party people, with... Read more
One of the things that has annoyed me the most about the recent pope coverage are stories that portray religion as being in competition. These stories are annoying because they seem to be more about the journalists’ assumptions than about what’s actually going on. Take, for example, Time Magazine‘s recent story on why a Latin American pope was elected. By now, I’m sure we’ve all heard that Latin American Catholicism, which once held a monopoly on Christianity in the region,... Read more
As the commentary rolls in on the election of Pope Francis yesterday, there are two thought trains that literally poop on the Pope Francis conversation. Both likely don’t know about each other and would probably start by hating each other’s guts. I think they’re a match made in heaven. The first set of conversation poopers are the progressive critics. These are the people who don’t like Pope Francis because of his opposition to same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, abortion, euthanasia, contraceptives,... Read more
Pope Francis gets it. The last few hours have seen waves of reaction to the election of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio to the papacy. It started with, “Huh? Who’s that?” It quickly moved on, as GetReligion pointedly mocks, to the fact that Bergoglio is from the New World, that he lives an austere lifestyle (taking public transportation, living downtown, cooking his own meals), and that he champions the poor over against unbridled global capitalism. It’s moved on now to his... Read more
The Liberal Party of British Columbia is reeling over a leak of an internal strategic document. Titled the “Multicultural Strategic Plan,” it attempts to detail how the BC Liberal Government should reach out to ethnic minority voters, especially Chinese Canadians, who allegedly and reportedly feel “ignored by government between elections” (p. 2). Since everyone has seen it, you should see it too. The plan details ways to win “ethnic communities”–which seems really to be code for “Chinese Canadian people” (see... Read more
Yesterday, the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice filed an amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court of the United States for Hollingsworth v. Perry. The case revolves around whether Proposition 8, the initiative in 2008 that amended the California state constitution to only recognize marriage between one man and one woman as legally valid, is constitutional. The Justice Department finds Proposition 8 unconstitutional. People who have been following the same-sex marriage cases in the United States that this is the... Read more
We are re-launching Religion Ethnicity Wired again today. That’s right: the same day that the pope is abdicating. It’s a perfect day to re-launch the conversation on religion and ethnicity. I trust folks like Fr. Robert Barron and Fr. Jim Martin, SJ, to give astute comments on the abdication on live television, not to mention the flurry of reflective activity in Catholic periodicals. Check out Our Sunday Visitor, America Magazine, Commonweal Magazine, and The Tablet for details. What I find... Read more
We are re-launching this blog tomorrow with some freshly brewed content. Stay tuned. If you stalk this page long enough, religion and ethnicity might wire you like coffee too. Read more
Eastern Catholic Person
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In