Last night, I decided on a whim, though it was late, to have a Reader’s Vespers for the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord and our Father among the Saints Basil the Great. I don’t have much by way of reflection in a formal sense, but I did want to address why I do these services and record them as part of the work of our mission in Chicago. Someone, for example, asked me why I don’t bother to... Read more
One of the pleasures of being on two calendars at the same time — the New in Richmond, the Old in Chicago — is that there are some points in the church year where I get celebrations twice. The time around Nativity and Theophany is one such point. I go home for the holidays when my fall quarter ends in early December, and I’m back in early January when my winter term begins. As it was, I got two celebrations... Read more
As far as I understand it, there is currently a hubbub over at Franciscan University of Steubenville about the chair of its English department, Professor Stephen Lewis, being sacked from his position as chair of the department, though he is still on the faculty. Professor Lewis is a Full Professor, which means that he is not only tenured, but has also received the highest rank of the professoriate. The furor seems to have to do with the ultra-conservative Catholic website,... Read more
I often tell the story of how in a course on trans-Pacific Christianities at the University of Washington, I said in the middle of a lecture that Eastern Christianities don’t matter in that region and then ate my words nine months later by becoming a catechumen in an Eastern Catholic church. I may have mentioned that one of the students in that course actually would count as canonically Syro-Malabar, as her father is technically in that church. Also, her mother... Read more
In the divergence of my academic work and my popular reflection, the common integrated theme that is emerging in both projects is the concept of the postsecular. I have been very taken with the British social geographer Paul Cloke’s most recent articulation of the term, where he talks about the postsecular as a kind of bubbling up from beneath the surface of the secular. He made this statement in a lecture delivered at the American Association of Geographers earlier this year.... Read more
My sister Joanna, the one actually born of the same mother in the flesh as me, has a YouTube channel that she calls JustAnotherFlutist. I was there when she started it. The idea she had in music school was that she was never going to be one of those superstar flutists who would land the dream orchestra job for which every seat had some three hundred competitors. She began making videos instead, showing the ordinariness of the background of a musician’s... Read more
I was having Hong Kong breakfast with my newly chrismated Hongkonger neophyte friends in Richmond over the summer when the wife of the couple said to me: You know, if I did not know you, one eye look at you, I think you are from Hong Kong. As a dear friend of mine says about Hong Kong borscht, the food at tea cafés, like Hong Kong breakfast, is our Cantonese revenge for chop suey. If white people can crave what they imagine to... Read more
I was around nine when the first Hong Kong tea café in the Fremont-Union City-Newark ‘tri-city’ area opened up. My mom was really excited. Until then, our meals out were at traditional Cantonese restaurants, often served family style. When I was small, my mom had told me about these places in Hong Kong that were known as ‘tea cafés,’ and they served Hong Kong-style European food: baked pork chop rice, mixed grilled steaks of beef and chicken, scrambled egg shrimp,... Read more
Atop the Basilica of Our Lady Help of Christians on Sheshan Hill in Shanghai stands the Most Holy Theotokos, her arms upraised to present the Child born from her to the world. The presentation is well within the style of our sister Latin Church, but the theology she presents, I reflect, has deep Kyivan resonances. The story goes that the Jesuits built the Basilica in the late nineteenth century because Shanghai was spared from the ravages of the Taiping Rebellion,... Read more
The day that most people know as Christmas Eve is for us on the New Calendar the Feast of the Holy Great-Martyr Eugenia of Rome. It is from that premise that I want to begin my reflections today as St Philip’s Fast wraps up. In writing this blog, I have had many interlocutors, but perhaps one of the most public ones has been my former student Eugenia Geisel, whom I taught at the University of Washington when I was a... Read more
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