Tag: devotional
Good Friday: From Grace, to Grace
When I organized a panel discussion in college about social justice and the Gospel, I was a new...
Read MoreLent Week 6: A Pandemic Passover: An invitation to Asian American Liberative Praxis
This is a dispatch in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic that has made its way out of East Asia and has now gripped the West. The trajectory of the novel coronavirus travels along the flows of finance capital, with capitalism as its true carrier. It trickles down to the working class and undocumented and raciailized and queer people, who will face suffering both greater in measure and invisibility. Not all lives matter in the same way, especially not in these times.
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Lent Week 1: Have mercy on me, a sinner.
Confession time. When the movie “Crazy Rich Asians” was released in theaters, I wasn’t really...
Read MoreLent Week 1: To Crucify Our Flesh
Source: Unsplash Reading: Galatians 5:13-26 In his sermon for the first Sunday of Lent, Augustine of Hippo preached, “It seems fitting that we, who are about to honor the Passion of our crucified Lord in the very near future,...
Read MoreAsh Wednesday: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Remembering is a radical act when colonialism depends on our communities forgetting our history and our shared humanity. Remembering is a radical act when imperialism makes us forget that our bodies are more than commodities,...
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From Revelation to Revolution: Lent 2020
Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of [people] upon their world in order to...
Read MoreAdvent 2019 – Day 25 – Merry Mary Christmas!
Christmas is the celebration of a birth. But a Christmas Jesus is a clean baby wrapped up in cloths, not a sticky one emerging from Mary’s body. Why is that? Is it our discomfort with our bodies, and in particular, women’s bodies (trans or cis)? The strangeness of the incarnation, this mixing of divine and human, that we don’t want to recognize? I’m not entirely sure. But I know that this Christmas, I want to see birth. I want to see a woman’s body intermingled with the divine. I want to see a record of the pain that comes before the joy.
Read MoreAdvent 2019 – Day 21 – A Psalm of Waiting
Artist: Anonymous I waited patiently for the Lord; They inclined to me and heard my cry. – – I asked him if he’d meet me for coffeeOn a cold day, cold for CaliforniaAs the leaves were just beginning to crisp...
Read MoreAdvent 2019 – Day 20 – Imagining an Alternative East Asian Christmas
I often wonder what a different Christmas might be like, what Christmas in Asia — in Persia, India, or China might have been like towards the end of the first millennium, when the early church in Asia had been active. How much of our understanding might be a relic of missionary and colonial history? How else have others understood the Incarnation in the past, and how might we broaden our horizons today?
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Advent 2019 – Day 19 – The Patience to Let Justice Grow
A few weeks ago I returned to Malaysia to visit family, and – lo and behold! – discovered that my mom had planted three coconut trees in the front yard. The coconuts require lots of tender, loving care, demanding precise amounts of fertilizing for a few years before it can bear fruit, before we can enjoy cooling, sweet, fresh coconut!
Read MoreAdvent 2019 – Day 18 – Mary
Growing up in a Chinese evangelical-ish church, kneeling was taboo unless it was to God. At my grandma’s funeral, our family had even been excused from the traditional Buddhist prostrations before her casket. Yet here is my art history teacher, already getting on his knees before the painting of Mary inside Cavalletti Chapel.
Read MoreAdvent 2019 – Day 17 – Who… me
“The Magnificat” by Lourdes Bernard “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s...
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