Awkward Asian Theologians

S3E10 Back To Where We Came From: Home

The Asians close the season by talking about life’s ordinary things. Matt insists the meaning of life is steam - the sigh above a bamboo basket, - but beneath it all, what we are really searching for is home. For migrants, “Where do you come from?” is never a simple question. The answer is layered: birthplace and accent, memory and longing, language half-forgotten at the dinner table, stories carried across oceans in reused plastic bags. But for Christians, the answer becomes stranger still: even those settled in one place are taught they are pilgrims, living between worlds. So Matt and Dan wander through the idea of home itself — memory, longing, belonging, and desire. Following Augustine like two tired uncles carrying groceries uphill, the Asians revisit the old saying that home is where the heart is, discovering that the heart itself is restless until it rests in God. In the end, the Asians suggest that the Christian life may simply be a long homesickness: learning where, and to whom, the heart truly belongs. Resources Pritvi Prakash & Ashwyn: Home is Where the Heart [https://share.google/S81707Cxi5BGWt1cA] Matthew Tan: Catholic Migrant Identity After Augustine, Bonaventure and Ratzinger [https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/catholic-migrant-identity-after-augustine-bonaventure-and-ratzinger/]

S3E9 The Theologians Behind the Asians: Influences

In this episode of Awkward Asian Theologians, things get personal - or at least as personal as Asians tend to get: somewhere between offering you fruit and quietly judging your life choices. We begin, as all serious theological reflection should, with the mysterious aesthetics of the Chinese neighbour’s front-yard market garden - equal parts abundance and chaos, bok choy and bitter melon staging a silent protest against suburban landscaping norms. From there, we make a graceful (read: slightly abrupt) pivot into another cherished pastime: contemplating the thinkers who have tilled the soil of Matt and Dan’s theological imaginations.   There are the usual suspects, of course - but also a few unexpected guests at the banquet table. Alongside familiar Western voices, you’ll find fellow Asian thinkers, a hint of French philosophical flair (because what is theology without at least a little existential seasoning?), and a wide-ranging cast of ancient and modern figures who refuse to stay in their assigned categories.   What unfolds is more than a reading list. It’s a conversation about how theology is actually done: how it listens and speaks, how it engages contemporary culture (sometimes like a gentle calligrapher’s brush, sometimes like a wok tossed over high heat), and how it carries wisdom across time and place. As the discussion deepens, something curious emerges - some of the most “Western” influences turn out to be less Western than expected. The lines blur, the labels loosen, and the whole map starts to look a bit improvised.   If you think you can predict who makes the list, the answers may surprise you - like being sent home with Chinese leftovers you didn’t ask for but will digest with delight. Resources Simon Oliver: Introduction to Nouvelle Theologie [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdzSt_fN_24] Matt Tan's book: A Theological Engagement with Pornography [https://www.routledge.com/A-Theological-Engagement-with-Pornography/Tan/p/book/9781032971315]

S3E8 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Panda: Power

It begins, innocently enough, with the weather – autumnal and aggressively mundane. The kind of long-weekend observation that should go nowhere. And yet, set against the quiet gravity of ANZAC weekend with its memory of sacrifice, service, and a national story marked by both courage and cost, it doesn’t stay small for long. In trueAwkward Asian Theologians fashion, the conversation spirals into something far less containable: a meditation on power.   Not the obvious kind - titles, authority, or who controls the group chat - but the subtler force that lingers in the background of things. The kind that shapes identities over time: habits, expectations, instincts you never consciously chose. Power that forms even as it limits, that is carried, absorbed and endured.   Drawing from both cultural experience and Catholic imagination, Matt and Dan circle this idea of power as something more than oppressive – as something quietly productive, even creative, shaping who we are beneath the level of awareness. Like calligraphy ink bleeding just slightly beyond the brushstroke, it works subtly, persistently, almost without notice – far more feng shui than force. Especially on a weekend like this, where memory itself becomes a kind of power, the question isn’t just who has it, but how it settles into us, rearranges us, and lingers like the last sip of tea gone cool.   Naturally, this leads to Scripture, which refuses to leave power comfortably defined. In Jesus Christ, power is not discarded but transfigured from the inside - expressed through self-gift, humility, and a disarming refusal to play by expected rules. Strength looks like surrender and divine authority looks like service. What emerges is not a denial of power, but a far more demanding vision of it – one that presses into the texture of our everyday Christian lives. Somewhere between the crisp autumn air and the Gospel, it becomes clear that power is not just something we talk about. It’s something we’re already participating in.

S3E7 The Great Catholic Bake Off: Parishes

Man and Dan return again to the basics. This time it is the parish, less like a system and more like a crowded yum cha table. You arrive and the dishes are already in motion. Someone is insisting you try the chicken feet, and the lazy Susan turns whether you’re ready or not. You take what comes, and yet somehow it becomes yours. So too, the parish. It unsettles our neat, menu-like idea of faith as clearly defined and properly ordered. Instead, faith begins not as propositions but as people in awkward space. Somewhat inconveniently, the Body of Christ involves actual bodies, bodies that crowd, linger, misread social cues, and yet still belong.  And yet it is precisely within this complication that the comfort of faith emerges, because orthodoxy here is not merely a matter of alignment with truth, but of commitment, and not only your own commitment, but the commitment of others to you. You do not simply choose the Church; rather, you find yourself, often quietly and somewhat irreversibly, included within it, drawn into a shared life that precedes your full understanding of it. The table continues to turn, the dishes continue to come, and you discover, almost in a Wong Kar-wai kind of way, that you are expected not only to remain, but to belong.  Resources Lumen Gentium: On the People of God [https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html]

S3E6 Metamucil for the Asian Soul: Beauty

The Asians step into the strange gravity of beauty, the transcendental that turns vibes into metaphysics. Engaging beauty as the "Metamucil of metaphysics", Matt and Dan dive into the depths of this dietary fiber of the soul. It is not glamorous, but without it everything backs up. Civilizations wobble. Liturgies lose their center. Even your aunties group chat starts to feel spiritually malnourished. But beauty is not just spiritual roughage. It is a shimmer, a kind of ontological aftertaste that lingers long enough to make you wonder whether reality itself is aesthetically structured, and whether God might actually care about beauty in more than a decorative sense. Rejecting the tired slogan that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the hosts take that idea apart piece by piece before offering something stranger and older in its place. They gesture toward a vision of beauty that radiates outward, like your mother’s disappointment.  Drawing from sources including Dionysius the Areopagite and Thomas Aquinas, they begin sketching a metaphysics in which Beauty is not subjective fluff but a real feature of being itself, something that orders desire, reveals truth, and perhaps even saves. All of which points, uncomfortably, to the possibility that your church PowerPoint might be a minor theological crisis. Resources Dionysius the Areopagite: Concerning Good, Light, Beauty, Love, Ecstasy, Jealousy, and Evil [https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/areopagite_03_divine_names.htm#c4]