Kwok Pui Lan

Being a Christian and Linsane

2012-02-17T17:25:00.000-05:00

Yao and Lin in Taiwan

Last Thursday I did not know Jeremy Lin. Since then I can’t have enough of him. I watched the Knicks games online, check out Jeremylin.net, searched YouTube for his replays, and read the extensive coverage of this Chinese American phenom in the Chinese newspaper World News and news websites.

Even his grandmother in Taiwan was interviewed for the New York Times. President Barack Obama, an avid basketball fan, talked about Linsanity with his staff. The Big Apple becomes Lin-city—all in just ten day!

Why this craziness? The cover of Sports Illustrated says it all. The cover photo is Jeremy Lin guarded by five Lakers players, with Kobe Bryant coming behind him. Lin scored a career-high 38 points and outdueling Bryant. The caption on the cover reads, “Against all odds: The sudden and spectacular ascent of Jeremy Lin.”

Watching Lin is fun. He is like a spinning top. His last-second 3-pointer beating Raptors was mesmerizing. He smiles after his spectacular shots and pumps his fists. We smile with him and enjoy the ride.

Onto his 6’ 3” and 200-pound body, many scripts have been projected, since we can look at his unexpected rise from so many angles at the intersections of race, gender, nation, sports, and faith.

The fact that he is the first American of Taiwanese or Chinese descent to excel at the NBA is no small matter.

China won 51 gold medals at the 2008 Summer Olympics. The men won shooting, weightlifting, diving, gymnastics, table tennis, badminton, canoeing, and swimming. They excelled in events that the bodies don’t even touch each other’s.

Nation and manhood are often intertwined in popular imagination. Chinese men have been called “the sick men of East Asia” for a long time. China’s national soccer team has become a laughing stock and a disgrace. Can Chinese men compete in physical games in which bodies collide and crush into each other?

Before Lin, we had Yao. But Yao Ming is exceptional. He is 7’ 6”. He was groomed nationally to be a basketball star.

Lin is Linderella. No one gave him a chance, even though he captained his Palo Alto High School team to a state title and led his Harvard team to the best records in the team’s history.

Now, everyone wants to claim a piece of Linsane. Asian Americans and Canadians wore T-shirts with his name to the games and rooted for him instead of for the home teams. Some Asian American women in New York went to sport bars to watch Lincredible even though they seldom watch basketball. His family underscores his Taiwanese background since both his parents came from Taiwan. But China claims him too since his maternal grandmother grew up in Zhejiang.

David Brooks in today’s New York Times looks at competitiveness in sports not through the national narrative, but through the lens of religion. Lin was brought up in a Christian home and became a Christian when he was a freshman in high school. He founded and led a Bible study group when he was at Harvard.

Brooks writes, “The moral ethos of sports is in tension with the moral ethos of faith, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim.” He says that modern sports emphasize assertion, competitiveness, and the display of prowess. Religion teaches humility, self-abnegation, and serving as an instrument for a larger cause.

So Brooks has not heard about a muscular Christianity that has been promoted in some circles. Jesus was depicted as a muscular, tattooed biker and boxer, ready to take on the world. This muscular Christianity has been bolstered by books such as No More Christian Nice Guy and The Church Impotent—Feminization of Christianity. This brand of Christianity is gaining grounds not only in American South but also in England to give Christian men a macho model.

If Brooks has simply googled Bible and sports, he would find that there are many Bible verses that tell us about how to become good athletes, touching on competition, preparation, winning, losing, and sportsmanship. “Do you know that in a race that the runners all compete, but only one receives a prize? Run in such a way that you may win it” (I Cor. 9:24). “Fight the good fight of faith” (I Tim 6:12). “And in the case of an athlete, no one is crowned without competing according to the rules” (II Tim 2:5).

Brooks has also misunderstood sports. Humility, unselfishness, and caring for the team rather than focusing on the self are essential winning qualities for team sports. Shaquille O’Neal had to humbly admit that his free throw shooting was one of his major weaknesses and improved on it over his career. Michael Jordan became great not simply because of his great athleticism and talent. He reached a mythical status when in his mature years, he knew how to be a team leader and made everybody around him play better.

In a 2010 interview in which Lin talked about his faith, he said, “For me to put more of an emphasis on my attitude and the way that I play, rather than my stats or whether we win a championship. I learned more about a godly work ethic and a godly attitude, in terms of being humble, putting others above yourself, being respectful to refs and opponents.” Such an attitude will serve him well and Linsanity will continue to spark and linspire.

Romney Doesn’t Get It

2012-01-20T22:48:00.001-05:00

Mitt Romney used to live in my town—Belmont, Massachusetts—but I am not rooting for the hometown boy.

Romney and his wife Ann raised their five sons in a big mansion on Marsh Street on Belmont Hill, which they sold in April 2009 for $3.5 million. The house has 6,434 square feet of luxury living space with 7 bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms, situated on 2.44 acres. I live down the Hill in a middle-class neighborhood and take the bus to go to work.

I have passed by Belmont Hill many times and I always marvel at the huge mansions. Needless to say I have never stepped inside the Belmont Hill Club for the super rich.

Before last Monday, almost all forecast said that Romney was poised to win South Carolina and cruise to nomination.

Yet a few hiccups on the way have upset his game. I am betting the Patriots beating the Ravens in the AFC Championship football game this Sunday. Will the hometown Mitt beat the surging Newt Gingrich? It is too close to tell, according to the many polls I have seen.

So what happens to Romney? You have to understand that for people who live in humongous mansions (his New Hampshire mansion worths $10 million and the one at La Jolla, CA worths $12 million) and frequent exclusive country clubs, $374,000 is a very small sum. That’s why he said, “I get speaker’s fees from time to time, but not very much.”

It is outrageous that Romney’s tax rate was about 15 percent because most of his income came from investments, while I paid tax at a higher rate. Romney’s wealth is estimated at about $250 million. He will be the richest presidential candidate if nominated.

Last night, when Romney was asked in the debate when he would release his tax returns, he was very awkward and seemed annoyed. Did he have something to hide? When his father George Romney ran for president in 1968, he released his past 12 years’ tax returns.

His failure to release his tax returns has spawned many rumors: he has parked his money in tax havens such as Cayman Islands and he has put millions in the IRA retirement account, which he is not supposed to. Much more damaging is that he might have invested in companies that outsource their jobs to other countries.

He said people who criticize him are simply envious of his success. He has earned it through hard work. He might be implying that we are just too lazy if we have not achieved his level of success.

He criticized President Obama for inciting “class warfare” and said it is divisive to speak of the one percent versus the 99 percent. Well, Mitt, we did not start the warfare. For three decades, the super rich has waged a war against the poor and the middle class. Between 1979 and 2007, incomes in the U.S. grew by 275 percent for the wealthiest 1 percent of households, 37 percent for the middle 60 percent of households, and 18 percent for the poorest 20 percent of households. Today the top 1 percent of Americans holds 39 percent of the nation’s wealth and takes in 25 percent of its annual income.

Talking about economic justice is different from creating class warfare. Buying and selling companies for personal profits is not the same as creating jobs. We still have to know more about his business practices at Bain Capital.

But one thing is clear. Romney only cares about those who live up the Hill in Belmont. He speaks for them and to them. He has tin ears to those who live down the Hill. For the first time living in Belmont for the last 16 years, I received a paper bag left on my foyer last November soliciting for donations for the Belmont foodbank. Even in middle-class suburban towns like Belmont some people have to choose between paying mortgage and buying food.

Romney just doesn’t get it.

How Blogging Has Changed My Thinking and Writing

2012-01-19T20:29:00.000-05:00

I wish I could say I start blogging to change the world. No, I started blogging with a very modest aim.

On January 23, 2011, I posted my first blog on this site. My aim was rather simple. I would ask students in the Spirituality of Contemporary World class to create a blog and post their journals there. Since I did not have the habit of blogging, I wanted to see how this worked. I created this blog and posted regularly in January and February. I posted 26 blogs in February alone. Then the number of blogs tapered off.

Many students in the course did not continue blogging after the class was over. But I carried on and had great fun writing it. In the year 2011, I posted 66 blogs. The number of words amounted almost to that of half a book.

Now with a year of blogging under my belt, I wish to look back to see how blogging has changed my thinking and writing.

First, blogging is thinking on the fly. You don’t have to do all the research in order to write a blog. If you do, it will be more like a research paper and not something instant. In the blogosphere, time is of essence. When Rick Perry drops out from the presidential race today, you can’t wait till tomorrow to write if you are a serious blogger. I sometimes wonder how Andrew Sullivan and other bloggers can comment so fast. This means you have to attend to current news and affairs if you want your blog to be fresh and relevant.

Second, blogging means writing fast. Although I consider myself a fast writer, blogging makes me type and write even faster. Sometimes it takes me less than an hour to write a blog. My colleagues and students are surprised that I have found time to do this, and they do not know that I sometimes blog at the end of day before I go to sleep. Since I don’t have much time, I just write what is in my mind to share with my readers. It may be the book I have just finished reading, the concert I attended, or anything I have read on the Internet. A blog is about 700 words. It's no big deal.

Third, I begin to pay attention to the craft of blogging. This is not a genre I was familiar with, since I write primarily for an academic audience. I look at how other popular bloggers start their first sentence, develop their narrative arc, and end on a high note. I learn to write in simple sentences and use simple words. I imagine my readers are from all over the world and may not know the U.S. context as well as I do. Indeed I was surprised to find that I have readers from Inner Mongolia, Iraq, Egypt, and so forth. I know not a single soul from these countries and am delighted to know that they have found me on the vast Internet.

Fourth, I learn that blogging can reach far more people than my books. For example, my most popular blog to date is “How to Read a Theological Book,” which has 4,179 pageviews, and the second most popular “Architecture of the Mind” has 2,330 pageviews. Many people have sent the links to their friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other networking sites. I encourage other academics to start blogging to popularize their ideas and to reach a much broader international audience.

Fifth, I cannot explain why some blogs are more popular than others. “Architecture of the Mind” is not a “popular” title and I was amazed to find that during one particular week 240 Russian readers read this and my other blog posts. I guessed a Russian professor might have found this interesting and assigned it to his or her students.

Sixth, even though I have written and edited numerous books, I am still intrigued by responses of my readers. Blogging allows me to gauge readers’ responses—number of pageviews and readers’ comments. After I post a blog, I check periodically to see how many people have read it and delight in seeing the number of pageviews grow. Blogging creates a virtual community. I envy bloggers who can post everyday and have many longtime readers who constantly give feedback.

Seventh, blogging changes my way of looking at the world. I become more alert to what is happening around me because I now have a medium that can capture snapshots in my life. It takes years to write a book and perhaps months to write an academic article. Blogging distills the moment.

Seven is good number and perhaps I should end here. How long does it take for me to write this? 34 minutes.

Prophetic Activism Is Not Dead in the U.S.

2012-01-17T22:26:00.000-05:00

In case you are wondering what progressive Christian communities are doing to promote justice in the United States and the world, the book Prophetic Activism is for you.

The author Helene Slessarev-Jamir is the Mildred M. Hutchinson Professor of Urban Studies at the Claremont School of Theology. She worked as a union and community organizer in Washington, D.C. and Chicago prior to graduate school. She is familiar with congregation-based community organizing and activism in support of worker justice and immigrant rights.

I came across this book when I searched in Amazon.com for a book that gives me a history of American churches’ involvement in social movements. This book does not so much tell me the past, but it provides a snapshot of the present.

The author notes that prophetic activism has arisen as a response to globalization of capital and production and the huge gap between the rich and the poor in wealthy countries and the deepening economic crises in poorer countries. This is in direct opposite to the Christian Right who gained national power by vilifying the welfare queens, urban black and Latino men, gays and lesbians, undocumented immigrants, and Muslims.

Prophetic activism is characterized by:

A commitment to nonviolent social change: influenced by Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha or active nonviolence and Martin Luther King Jr’s civil rights movement.
The incorporation of aspects of liberation theology, especially among the Catholics.
The openness to diverse spiritual practices and to working with people of other faith traditions.
The use of popular education and bottom-up organizing to bridge the gap between the marginalized and the privileged.
A concern for the well-being of the marginalized and for upholding basic human rights for all.

After elaborating on how prophetic activism is grounded in the Hebrew Bible and Jesus’ teachings, Slessarev-Jamir discusses five arenas of prophetic activism in the United States: congregational community organizing influenced by Latin American liberation theology, religious worker-justice work, immigrants rights (activism along the border with Mexico and the new sanctuary movement), religious peacemaking, and finally global justice.

As I am working on a book on the Occupy movement, I find the chapter on global justice particularly illuminating.

Slessarev-Jamir uses the examples of Bread for the Word, Witness for Peace, Jubilee 2000, ONE campaign against global poverty, Save Darfur and Invisible Children in this chapter. She provides the background of these organizations and interviews staff and workers to offer a rich narrative.

Last Monday we had a U2 Eucharist at our school and we were introduced to the ONE campaign. A student from Iowa brought a quilt for the altar made by the young people in her church depicting the vision for the ONE world and the presider wore a similar stole. It reminded us that congregations can be important sites for mobilizing for action and worship can unleash the power of prophetic activism.

The Occupy movement can be seen as a continuation of the global justice movement: the linkage of the local and the global, the use of the Internet and social networking sites, the creation of songs, symbols, and popular culture, the horizontal organization, and networking with religious communities (e.g. the use of church space for meetings after the tent-cities were raided).

The book gives us a lot of hope, knowing that activism is alive and many churches and organizations are heeding the call to prophetic justice. At a time when cynicism runs deep and many people have lost much faith in political and economic institutions, I hope the churches can continue to signal to the world that God’s people are not frozen. They are still at the frontline, fighting for a better world.

The book concludes: “prophetic activism greatly enriches religious life in America by creating meaningful opportunities for religious people to connect their spirituality to a variety of just causes.” Faith without action is dead, the liberation theologians have taught us.

A New Wave of Scholarship

2011-12-26T18:11:00.000-05:00

I came to the United States in 1984 to begin my doctoral studies at Harvard Divinity School. It was an exciting time to do feminist theology and religious studies. Womanist ethics just began to emerge, as Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon had just completed a dissertation on the subject at Union Theological Seminary in 1983. I count it as a blessing that she was teaching at the Episcopal Divinity School, on the other side of the Cambridge Common.

The mid-1980s saw the paradigm shifts in feminist studies in religion, as womanist, mujerista/Latina, Asian and Asian American women began to articulate their own theological understanding. If Womanspirit Rising (1979) was a reference text for our field, which contains essays by white women, we had the first reader by radical women of color, This Bridge Called Our Back (1981).

We began to discuss multiple oppressions and multiple identities, and the need to integrate race, class, and gender into our analyses. We challenged white women who have universalized their middle-class, white experience as if women are all the same.

In the past several years, I participated in a group investigating the intersections among race, sexuality, and postcoloniality, since we were using critical race theory, queer studies, and postcolonial theory in our work. We wanted to see what are the commonalities and differences if we looked at the intersections through different racial lenses, sexual practices, and (post)colonial experiences.

I am glad to see many new works have been published that push us to see the intersections in radically new ways. The subtitle of Strange Affinities is worth paying attention to: “The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization.” The cutting-edge essays explore the production of racialized, genderized, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions or the “strange affinities.” Even the headings of the different sections make me think, “alternative identifications,” “undisciplined knowledges,” and “unincorporated territories, interrupted times.”

If you are one of those who think psychoanalysis is nothing more than a mind trick of middle-class Europeans, think again. Unconscious Dominions says, “By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism.” In Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, Ranjana Khanna reveals “the psychical strife of colonial and postcolonial modernity.” The collection of essays in Unconscious Dominions pushes the envelope even further, with the ambitious subtitle “Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties.” The contributions touch on French West Africa, Algeria, Australian aborigine, India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Haiti. It is nothing less than “psychoanalysis writing back.”

If you are puzzled by why the police and officials used so much force to harass and arrest the peaceful Occupiers, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State will offer you much food for thought. Chandan Reddy examines “a crucial contradiction at the heart of modernity: the nation-state’s claim to provide freedom from violence depends on its systematic deployment of violence against peoples perceived as nonnormative and irrational.” Remember that Newt Gingrich told the Occupiers to “go get a job right after you take a bath”?

If I belong to the generation that has pushed against the boundary of the white canon and scholarship, I see a new wave of scholarship is on the horizon. This new wave radically interrogates assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, culture, national citizenship, global sovereignty and global futures. Brilliant and groundbreaking, these new works stretch our static concepts and methods, introduce the new vocabularies of globalized unconscious and fragmentation of sovereignties, and investigate the connection between violence and social formations of difference. It theorizes the nation and the global in ways much more sophistically than what our generation has done.

There is a time lag between religious scholarship and scholarship in other disciplines, usually about 10-15 years. Edward W. Said published Orientalism in 1978, and the first essay on postcolonial biblical criticism by R. S. Sugirtharajah was not published until 1994. The first book on postcolonial theology appeared in 2004.

I sincerely hope that the upcoming generation of religious scholars will catch up sooner and engage with this new wave of scholarship in earnest.

Jesus Would Have Been Born in the Camp

2011-12-25T10:59:00.000-05:00

Occupy Wall Street. Occupy London. Occupy Harvard. Occupy your school. Occupy your office. Occupy everything.

Occupy Christmas? Yes, Jesus would have been born in the camp.

On October 27, the Rev. Giles Fraser, canon chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, spoke about his resignation because of his objection to the use of force to evict the protesters of Occupy London Stock Exchange, who have camped outside St. Paul’s Cathedral.

He said, “What the camp does is challenge the church with the problem of the incarnation – that you have God who is grand and almighty, who gets born in a stable. St Paul was a tent maker. If you tried to recreate where Jesus would have been born, for me I could imagine Jesus being born in the camp.”

Even if Jesus was not born in the camp, he would certainly join the Occupy movement, for he was part of Occupy the Temple of his day.

Really?

Jesus and the Disciples in an Occupy Drum Circle by Sudeep Johnson

When I saw this picture with the article on The Huffington Post, I began to laugh. Yes, Jesus and the moneychangers. How could we have forgotten?

Don’t the conservatives always ask, “What would Jesus do?” Tell them, Jesus overturned the moneychangers’ tables and drove them from sacred ground. As Richard Eskow said, “It’s hard to describe Jesus’ action against the moneychangers in today’s terms without calling it ‘Occupy the Temple.’”

Now the police and officials have raided the tent-cities in the U.S. The once vibrant encampment at Dewey Square in Boston is no more. When you pass through it today, the ground has been resodded and you would have not guessed that some 100 tents were there just over two weeks ago.

So this is it? Not quite.

I went to the general assembly at the Boston Common the night after the campsite was raided at 5 a.m. on December 10 to support the Occupiers. The Dewey Square camp was the longest continuous campsite in the U.S.—for 72 days. It was a peaceful demonstration and yet the authorities would not allow it to continue.

But the Occupy movement was never about seizing public lands and establishing tent-cities. In this new Occupy 2.0, the movement depends on community and grassroots support. In Boston, St. Paul’s Cathedral was the first to open their sanctuary for the Occupiers to meet on December 13. Dean Jep Streit said that the church is not taking sides, but wants to provide a space for the important conversations for economic justice to continue.

In England, Occupy London Stock Exchange continues to camp outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. They will remain there until January 11, 2012, when the High Court makes its decision on eviction. The camp now has about 150 tents.

Asked in Radio Times what Jesus would do in response to the Occupy group, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said he would be there “sharing the risks, asking the long and hard questions.”

At the Christ Church Cathedral at St. Louis, Missouri, the Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church, USA, also made connection between Jesus and the Occupy movement. She said in her sermon “I am profoundly struck, however, by the parallels between the Occupy movement and Jesus’ band of homeless wanderers. . . The Occupiers have shared food, cared for each other, and challenged the rest of us about justice in the size of paychecks. Now those who have been evicted are struggling with how to continue their global demonstration.”

Churches in the U.S. have long been involved in social movements: anti-slavery, temperance, women’s liberation, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender liberation. On this Christmas day, I hope churches will provide hospitality for this movement to continue.

Postcolonial Theory and Newt

2011-12-05T11:33:00.001-05:00

Who says that postcolonial theory is too difficult and abstract, and can only be discussed among the academics in their ivory tower?

No, it is discussed on the pages of the New York Times, in the heat of presidential politics. By whom? By the witty, irreverent, and red-hair op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd.

The same Maureen Dowd who wrote about the spellbound love story of Patti Smith, the volatility of Steve Jobs, and the sexual abuse at Penn State?

It is sometimes easy to forget that she was a winner of the Pulitzer Prize on commentary, and has been a White House correspondent and covered four presidential campaigns. She is so smart and covers much more than politics.

She knows Newt, in depth. Many of us know that Newt Gingrich, the frontrunner in the GOP presidential contest, is a historian—a pricey one at that. He charges about $1.6 million from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for consultation fee as a “historian.” The American Historical Association should crown him its Patron Saint or give him a Life Achievement Award.

Well, what does the professor write on? Novels and serious non-fictions. But he cut his teeth as a historian writing on Africa. On Congo to be precise. His dissertation at Tulane University submitted in 1971 was entitled “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960.”

I am one of those busy academics who have heard about this, but have not actually read it. But Dowd told us what Newt wrote in “Out of Africa into Iowa.” Newt said that colonialism under Belgium was both good and bad. Until the Congolese had been educated enough by the colonizers, they were not ready to rule themselves. He also said that we should not “generalize” white exploitation.

Newt is not the only historian defending colonialism. The British historian and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson is another one. In Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, he states that colonialism is a benign form of global government. The British Empire collapsed not because of decades of struggles of colonized people, but because of the overreach of the Empire. He bemoans the fact that the U.S. is not prepared to take up the mantle and finish what the British Empire has started.

Now back to Newt. Congo is a country that captivates all postcolonials. Why, because Joseph Conrad wrote The Heart of Darkness, based on Congo. Edward W. Said has written about the novella again and again. Did Conrad try to contrast the darkness of the continent with the “light of civilization?” Or did he try to demonstrate the brutality of the Belgian colonial regime and the self-doubt of Marlow? Where can we locate the “darkness”—in the natives or in the hearts of the colonizers?

As a historian, Newt fails repeatedly to read the signs of the time. At the height of the civil rights and Black Power movement and global protest in 1971, he sided with the colonizers. In 2011, forty years later, the former professor has not become wiser. At the height of the Occupy movement, he said that the poor people are poor because they are lazy. He said we should abolish children labor laws so that the poor kids can work as janitors. He sides with the 1 percent.

Newt, the 99 percent are not stupid. They are the ones who will decide whether you can become the president or not.

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” said George Santayana. If the American people did not know the true color of Newt the first time he was around, they should know it by now. Otherwise, God save America.

Running for the President of the American Academy of Religion

2011-11-28T22:38:00.001-05:00

“Pui Lan, would you be willing to run for the Vice-President of AAR?” the chair of the Nominations Committee of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) called and asked me back in April 2008.

The AAR, with 10,000 members, is the world’s largest professional organization of scholars in religion. The majority of its members are from the U.S., but approximately 17 percent are international scholars from over 70 countries.

It was a great honor to have been nominated—for the Vice-President would be in line to become the President in 2011. The problem was that there would be an election and I would have to compete with another candidate, who happened to be a professor at Harvard University.

I thought, “If I win, that’s good. But what happens if I lose?”

That spring Hillary Clinton was competing with Barack Obama to be the nominee for the Democratic Party. She lost to Obama in the Iowa caucuses and fought back tears after being asked how she kept going in New Hampshire.

Although I was rooting for Obama, I was deeply impressed by Clinton’s courage to face defeat after defeat so publicly.

I asked myself, “If Clinton can face losses in such a public way, what do I have to lose?”

Yes, what have I got to lose?

I decided to run for the AAR presidency because I wanted to stand up for others. Even when I was a doctoral student, I was frequently invited to speak in meetings in churches and academia. I would be the lone Asian woman speaking on a panel.

I generally preferred to stand up when speaking so that the audience could see me. Very often after my speech, there would be a soft-spoken, timid Asian female student, who would come up to tell me that she was glad to see me standing and speaking. In the 1980s, an Asian feminist theologian was a rare sight.

So when I received the call, I remembered these Asian women students who once told me they were proud to see an Asian woman standing. When I said yes, I was answering to a larger call in life.

In a Wabash workshop for pre-tenured Asian and Asian American faculty, I said that as leaders, we have to bring the tribe along. Those of us who are pioneers have the responsibility of opening the door a little wider for others to come.

After Hillary lost, she told the misty crowd gathered at Washington’s National Building Museum: “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it.” She also said, “And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.”

I have received many awards and recognitions in life. The AAR presidency would be like icing on the cake. Like Hillary, I want to make the path a little easier for others next time.

In the 102 years of history of the AAR, only seven or eight racial and ethnic minority scholars have been elected as President. I am the second person of Asian descent to have been elected; the first one was Professor Vasudha Narayanan of the University of Florida, who specializes in Hinduism. She was also the first woman of color to have served in this prestigious position.

Some Asian American scholars and students organized a banquet to honor me on the eve of the AAR annual meeting at San Francisco on November 18. I said to them, “Tomorrow night I will deliver the Presidential Address. I hope that many years later, you will remember that I stood up and spoke from the podium.” I wanted to encourage them to answer the call and accept invitations and challenges that come their way. If I can stand up, they can too.

Sugirtharajah's Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism

2011-11-15T10:41:00.001-05:00

R. S. Sugirtharajah and Pui Lan, 2010

What is the need for another introduction to postcolonial biblical criticism? Didn’t Sugirtharajah publish the highly acclaimed Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford 2002) almost a decade ago? The answers to these questions are simple: postcolonial biblical criticism keeps on developing.

This text begins with an introductory chapter on postcolonial theory and concludes with an afterword that discusses the future of postcolonial biblical criticism. It charts the development of the field, criticizes Orientalist reading practices, and offers helpful reading strategies. It includes a chapter by Ralph Broadbent summarizing the foundational texts in postcolonial biblical criticism.

On the back cover, Stephen D. Moore says the book is accessible to novices, but “old hands will also learn enormously from it.” I couldn’t agree more.

The first chapter offers an updated development of the postcolonial condition. In the past, postcolonialism was based on what Gayatri Spivak has called a “South Asian model.” But today’s Empire is decentered and deterritorialized (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) and different from the previous colonial period. I detect urgency in the book to address economic inequity brought by globalization. Sugirtharajah said, in the early stage, postcolonial critics focused on political independence of former colonies. Then attention moved onto the dislocation and displacement of migrants and diasporans. Today, postcolonialism must address global hunger and the plight of the rural poor and peasants (20). In this way, the book wants to respond constructively to the persistent Marxist critiques of postcolonial biblical criticism by David Jobling, Roland Boer, and Gerald West.

I was struck by Sugirtharajah’s suggestion that biblical studies be considered an essential component of Oriental studies. In Orientalism, Edward Said already indicted the philological work of Ernest Renan, a major contributor to the historical quest of Jesus in the nineteenth century (author of Vie de Jésus, 1863). Placing biblical studies within the parameters of Oriental Studies allowed us to distinctly see how Orientalist archetypes have been reactivated in social-scientific approaches to biblical studies. Sugirtharajah denounced the Orientalist construction of the “Mediterranean” in the works of John Pilch and Bruce Malina. The use of cultural anthropology in biblical studies has created the binary of “us” versus “them,” and gives further support to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Said’s contrapuntal reading has been well known in postcolonial criticism. In this book, Sugirtharajah insightfully uses Said’s exposition of “late style” to discuss the writings of Paul and John. Said discusses the two contrasting late styles found in artists and thinkers during the twilight of their creative careers. One is wisdom, serenity, and harmony. The other fascinates Said for its display of “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” In music (Said was an accomplished pianist and music critic), Beethoven, Richard Strauss, and Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte” demonstrated this late style.

Sugirtharajah says that Paul’s Romans represents the first late style. According to Acts, he was a troublemaker and arrested for resisting Roman authorities numerous times. But in Romans, he became mellow and told his followers to submit to the authorities (Rom. 13). John’s Book of Revelation represents the other late style, if John is taken to be the same author of the Fourth Gospel. The Book of Revelation is uncompromising in its anti-imperial stance, in sharp contrast to the apolitical nature of the Gospel of John.

The volume addresses the issue that male postcolonial biblical critics have not paid attention to feminist issues. Broadbent’s chapter includes a section on “postcolonialism and feminism” (83-86). Sugirtharajah points his readers to resources on mutual criticism between feminists and postcolonial critics (19-20), criticizes the misogyny in the Book of Revelation (161), and challenges the use of gender stereotypes in the construction of the Mediterranean (107-108). These are good attempts – but much more can be said.

The contribution of queer studies to postcolonial criticism is glaringly missing in the book. The leading queer theorist Judith Butler has written on war, Zionism, and American imperialism. Marcella Althaus-Reid’s work and some of the chapters in The Queer Bible Commentary include analyses of imperial power. Contrary to Sugirtharajah’s comment that the Song of Songs falls outside the concerns of postcolonalism (53), Christopher King’s reading of the Song in The Queer Bible Commentary shows that transgressive love prefers the outsider. This has implications for the construction of the “other,” an issue discussed throughout Sugirtharajah’s book. The intersection between postcolonialism and queer studies has been broached in other fields and ought to be included in discussing the future of postcolonial biblical criticism.

*This review first appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Networks, November 2011.

Getting Published

2011-11-14T21:55:00.003-05:00

In the past two years, two very talented racial and ethnic minority colleagues were denied tenure by their universities. Among the reasons given was that they did not have enough publications.

I want to share my experience as a writer and editor for more than 25 years. I especially want to speak to those of you who find yourself in the situation that you have little time to write.

To get published, you need to do 5 things:

1. You must have something to say. Many dissertations have been written, but only a very tiny number get published. Why? Because the dissertations have too many footnotes. When I published my first book, one reviewer said that the book had all the features of a dissertation, namely, lots of notes and short summaries. As all doctoral students want to do, I tried to document everything to impress my professors and to avoid plagiarism. I felt comfortable hiding behind what other scholars had said.

After listening to Pamela Johnson, an editor at Fortress Press, speaking to a group of young scholars and students, I knew why so many dissertations cannot get published. Many dissertations use many chapters to rehearse or explain what other scholars have said about the subject. This is called literature review. It is only in the final chapter that the author brings out his or her own viewpoints. Editors are not interested in a book full of citations of what others have said. They are interested in what you, as the author, have to say on the subject. Pam asked the audience to imagine what their book would look like if they start from the final chapter.

2. Learn the craft of publishing. Two university presses turned down my dissertation before it got published. I wish William P. Germano’s From Dissertation to Book had been available at that time. Unfortunately the book came out much later. In that book, Bill Germano guides the reader through the process of publishing your first book: from revising your dissertation, reading with an editor’s eyes, to making your prose speak.

Many of us think that if we have some good ideas, we will be able to get them published. Not so. We spent many years honing the skills of writing academic papers. Turning a paper into a published article for a journal is a learning process. Learning to publish a book is a learning process. Over the years, I have read many books on writing. I enjoyed Stephen King’s book On Writing and Bonnie Friedman’s Writing Past Dark. After I asked a professional editor to edit my work, I was surprised that she could spot so many mistakes, while I couldn’t. So I read the book How to Edit Your Own Writing. After the page proofs came back, I needed to know how to mark the corrections. I found out The Chicago Manual has a few chapters in the beginning that I had overlooked. They talk about manuscript editing and proofs. As you can see, I needed to learn each step along the way. When I became an editor, I had to learn many new things. After I submitted the manuscript for my most recent edited volume, Hope Abundant, the editor at Orbis Books was very pleased that the manuscript was in such great shape. I had published with the same editor 16 years ago. I told her that I have learned much about publishing in the intervening years.

3. Make your proposal stand out. Many trade presses have changed their editors in the last couple of years and publishing houses have slashed their programs. I spoke to one publisher recently. His press used to publish 75 books a year, but the number was cut to half last year. When I asked why, he said people are not buying books in this economy. Even university presses, which are non-profits, are watching closely the bottom line.

A book sells because of the author and the contents. If you are not yet a well-known author, your book must have a great title and attractive contents. Your proposal must convince the editor that the book will have a market. The marketing people will sit down with the editors in the editorial committee to decide whether to accept or reject your proposal. If your book can be adopted as a textbook, you will have a better chance of getting it published. If you wonder how to write a good proposal, I recommend the book Thinking Like Your Editor by Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato. The book even contains a sample proposal and a sample chapter. Don’t get discouraged when your proposal is rejected. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s book Women, Native, Other got rejected numerous times. She went on to become an internationally acclaimed cultural critic and filmmaker.

4. Find time to write. I was very impressed by how many books that Miguel De La Torre, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Mark Jordan, and Daniel Harrington have produced. So I asked them what are their secrets. I found out that they write almost all the time and everyday, except for the weekends. De La Torre wakes up at 5 a.m. and reads and writes for 6 hours 3 to 4 days a week, with the goal of writing 10 pages per week. I must confess that I do not have that discipline.

For racial and ethnic minority scholars, finding time to write is such a luxury. Many of us do not teach in research universities and have a heavy teaching load. We are put on all the committees and we have communities of accountability outside the school.

But I have become convinced that only those of us who can wean ourselves from the electronic gadgets that constantly connect us with the outside world can write and get published. This may sound old-fashioned. But writing is a very lonely business and takes a lot of concentration. We need a stretch of time so that our ideas can simmer and our thoughts can develop.

We have to learn to protect our brain. In his book Crazy Busy, Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating ADD and has ADD himself, says that our culture is producing people with ADT (attention deficit trait). We can’t focus because there are so many attractions. Our attention span becomes short and we are so overwhelmed that we are about to snap. He said, “Being busy may very well keep you from doing what matters most, or it may lead you to do things you deem unwise.” In a very humorous way, he tells us how to address the problems from brain science and psychiatry and encourage us to find our solutions. He even includes a chapter on “Why women have it harder than men.”

5. Nurture Relationships. Here I mean both professional and personal relationships. If the editor has met you and talked with you, she or he will have a face to associate with when she or he is reading the book proposal. I encourage you to introduce yourself to the editors at the book exhibit and tell them the exciting projects you are working on. Get to know the senior scholars in the field so that when they are editing an anthology, they will think of including your work.

Many books begin with an acknowledgment thanking the spouses, partners, and children for their support. Writing may take you away from attending ball games, watching videos, or doing other fun things with family. But sometimes, these distractions keep you sane. Balancing all the demands is a fine art.

I am the advisor with Joerg Rieger to the Religion in Modern World Series of Rowman and Littlefield and co-editor with Ivan Petrella of the Reclaiming Liberation Theology Series of SCM. Religion in Modern World aims at the general audience and focuses on how modernity is reconciled within each religious tradition. Liberation Theology has been considered dead in some circles. SCM publishes works of liberation theology by a new generation of scholars who expand the problematique of liberation theology. I hope to hear from you.

*Presented at a panel on "Getting Published" at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, San Francisco, November 20, 2011.

Tips for Presentation

2011-11-12T09:54:00.001-05:00

Next weekend, I am going to present the Presidential Address at the American Academy of Religion, since I serve as the president of the organization for 2011. The title of my address will be “Empire and the Study of Religion.” I have already finished writing the paper, so I have time to think about how to present it.

Some time ago when I passed through a bookstore at an airport, I saw a book that analyzes why Steve Jobs’ keynotes to launch new Apple products were so great. I went to look for the book at a local bookstore. The title is The Presentation Secret of Steve Jobs.

I learned a lot from the book and from observing others making great speeches.

Look at the audience. Jobs seldom stood behind a lectern reading a text. He moved on the stage and established rapport with his audience. He used a lectern for his Stanford commencement address in 2005, but he looked at the crowd frequently. Body language matters and your face conveys as much as 20 percent of your message. Babies learn much by looking at your face.

Provide a road map. In his commencement address, he said, “Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life.” And he proceeded to tell them.

Tell the audience why they should care. Your audience has one question in mind, “Why should I care?” You have to answer this at the beginning of your talk to pique people’s interest.

Use a conversational tone. We know the ways that techies speak or write. Full of gibberish. We understand little and remember none. Use plain English and a conversational tune. Avoid unnecessary jargons.

Create Twitter-like headlines. If you need to summarize what you need to say in 140 characters, what would you say? Jobs said the Macbook Air is “the world’s thinnest notebook.”

Speak with passion. If you speak with confidence and passion, people will respond more to what you have to say. If you really don’t care what you are saying, why should other people care?

Use visuals wisely. Jobs used very simple slides. No bullet points and not more than a few words on each slide. People come to listen to you. They have not come to read texts on the slides.

Create an unexpected moment. Jobs’ presentations always had a WOW moment. In the launch of Macintosh, the computer spoke. To stress the thinness of Macbook Air, he casually pulled one out from within a manila envelope.

Obey the ten-minute rule. This is really hard for academics. According to numerous researches, people’s brains wonder and their attention span lasts for only 10-15 minutes. Jobs rarely made long speeches. His Stanford address was 14.11 minutes long. He would do a demo or invite others to share the stage. If you need to make a lecture of 40 minutes, good luck! You have to find ways to capture people’s attention.

Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Jobs made it look so easy, but he rehearsed the presentation for days. His attention to details was legendary. He asked the technician to change the lighting so that the iMac’s translucent color could be shown perfectly.

One more thing. Jobs often concluded his keynotes by saying “one more thing.” How do you want to conclude your talk? What do you want to leave on people’s mind?

Christianity in China

2011-10-22T20:49:00.001-04:00

Chongyi Church in Hangzhou, China

How many people will come to listen to a lecture on “Women and Christianity in China” in a small liberal arts college in the Midwest in the United States?

More than 500 showed up and some students had to sit on the floor. Was it about China? Was it about Christianity, since St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, is Catholic? Was it about me, the speaker?

It helped that some professors had assigned my articles for their classes and asked the students to attend the lecture. But still it was amazing to see so many faculty and students.

My lecture was part of St. Ambrose’s University’s China: The Awakening Dragon, a year-long exploration of China’s global impact.

Why the interest in China?

The President and some faculty of St. Ambrose will travel to China next year to explore possible partnerships. Next year 15 Chinese students will arrive on campus to begin a pilot project. With the economic boom in China, many parents want to send their children abroad to study and some of American colleges and universities are eager to court these international students.

I have not been invited to speak about China often because I have mainly spoken at seminaries, divinity schools, and departments of religious studies. These institutions have not awakened to the impact of China in the twenty-first century yet. Many are still very Eurocentric in their curriculum and outlook. Some have just caught up with the American century in the 20th century, and it will be some time before they will finally wake up to face the Pacific Century.

So what about Christianity in China?

We have heard about the shift of Christian demographic to the South, because of the growth of Catholicism and the Pentecostal movement in Africa. Yet China is poised to become the country with the largest number of Christians. And this is happening in a Communist country with a staunch atheist stance.

According to the official statistics from China Christian Council in 2010, there were 23 millions Protestant Christians in China, more than 30 times the figure for 1949 (about 700,000); 56,000 churches and meeting points; and 21 seminaries and Bible schools. But there are a few hundred thousand of house churches that are unregistered, with anywhere between 50-55 million adherents.

The Catholics are estimated to be more than 12 million, worshipping in 6,000 churches, and there are well over 3,000 priests and 5,000 religious sisters.

Relation between the Chinese Catholic Church and the Vatican has been strenuous because the Chinese Catholic Church selected their own bishops, who are not recognized by the Vatican. There are many Catholics who belong to the underground church, which remains loyal to the Pope.

I first visited the churches in China in the early 1980s. The churches were reopened after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the turbulent years when the Gang of Four ruled. All religious activities were suspended; pastors were denounced and sent to be reeducated and church properties confiscated.

When the churches reopened, they decided to stay together and form one post-denominational church. Most of the people who came to church in the 1980s were older people, who have been Christians. The pastors were middle-aged or older. I was impressed by their steadfast faith and perseverance during the Cultural Revolution.

In the fall of 2009, I visited the Chinese churches again and I was surprised by the phenomenal church growth. The priest at a church in Suzhou was only about 30 years old and the preacher was a young woman in her twenties! Some 2,000 people attended church that Sunday and the church could not accommodate all. Latecomers had to go to the conference rooms to participate in worship by watching close-circuit TV.

The largest church in China is Chongyi Church in Hangzhou, which can sit 5,000 people. It is located inside the city, surrounded by tall buildings. Dedicated in 2005, the Church has a nice choir and different programs for different age groups. Before the service, I went to the church’s bookstore to buy the Chinese hymnal, religious books, and CDs of sermons and hymns.

Chinese Christians love to sing and many come to church an hour earlier to learn to sing Christian hymns. Since the reopening of the churches, many new hymns have been composed by Chinese musicians. I was delighted to see that a bilingual version (English and Chinese) of the hymnal was published. This was a labor of love of the late Dr. Wong Wing Hei, who supervised the project when he was in his late eighties.

I wish I would be invited to speak about Christianity in China in seminaries and divinity schools to a large audience, even though it may not be 500.

Occupy Boston and the Minjung

2011-10-19T22:50:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I went to visit Occupy Boston in Dewy Square by South Station in downtown Boston. Occupy Boston began on September 30, inspired by the much larger Occupy Wall Street movement in New York.

Occupy Boston is a tent city with 40-50 tents. It has its reception area, kitchen, portable toilets, and an elevated area used as the stage. Dewey Square is filled to capacity. The attempt to expand to a second camp met with strong resistance from the police. Nearly 150 were arrested on October 11.

One of my students has camped out at Dewey Park since the very beginning. He is an anarchist and has longed for participating in a movement to bring down capitalism for more than 10 years. He cannot believe that there are thousands of people like him who want to challenge corporate greed and the neo-liberal economy.

What is most exciting for him is the leaderless, horizontal organization that is developing. During the general assemblies when they gather for discussion and for decision-making, hand gestures are used to indicate “like,” “dislike,” “yes,” “no” and so forth. This is taking a page from the anarchist’s playbook.

The media at first did not pay much attention to the Occupy movement, describing it as a movement of privileged students. But the people at Occupy Boston are much more diverse: homeless people, older people, and members of the unions. Clergy have shown up and church members have visited the site. It is a coalition of many sectors of the community. Time magazine says it represents “the return of the silent majority.”

The movement declares, “We are the 99 percent.” In the U.S., the top 1 percent gets over 20 percent of the total income.

It was amazing to see that people in more than 950 cities worldwide have organized protests on the International Day of Solidarity with the Occupy Movement on October 15, 2011. In Hong Kong, around 500 protesters gathered outside the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Most of the participants were young and they also used the “We are the 99 percent” slogan.

Several years ago, I have read Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Multitude. Instead of class, they used the term multitude to denote the heterogeneous mass of people who will rise up against Empire. The multitude is linked by the Internet, the social media, and mobile devices. Since Empire is transnational, the multitude must also be a global force and represents a new form of politics.

I thought at the time the idea of the multitude is too abstract: who will organize them? And where do they come from? But we have seen the force of the multitude several times in the last decade: during the global demonstrations against the Iraq War and now the Occupy Movement.

Will the multitude have the sustaining power to effect structural changes? It might be too early to tell about the Occupy movement. But one thing I am certain: conversations have begun in the kitchens, classrooms, and living rooms. Our school had a teach-in session facilitated by our President and another professor, who are veterans of social movements.

The Bible has a word for the crowd of people following Jesus. They are called the ochlos (e.g Matt. 4:25; 8:1). In South Korea in the 1970s, minjung theologians used this term to describe the mass of people who are oppressed by society. Minjung comes from two Chinese characters 民众, which mean mass of people. Similar to Hardt and Negri, minjung theologians do not limit minjung to the working or lower class. Women are the minjung when they are oppressed by the patriarchal society. The colonized are minjung when they are dominated by the colonizers.

Minjung theologians say that for too long, the church only pays attention to the laos (laity), and leave out from its purview the ochlos.

Minjung theology was developed during the dictatorial regime of Park Chung-hee. Today South Korea has become much more democratic with significant economic growth. I am not sure that minjung theology is as popular as it once was. Furthermore, the tactics used by minjung theologians, focusing on national political struggle, may not be adequate to fight against Empire.

We will need a more globalized minjung theology, which can speak to the issues of our time. This minjung theology must be transnational, heterogeneous, fluid, and responsive to local needs and issues. This cannot be written by the elites alone, but must be a participatory theological movement from the bottom-up.

I wonder why did Jesus attract great crowds following him? What did they see in the promise of Jesus? Why do the churches not attracting the multitude today?

Theological Education and Interfaith Learning

2011-09-25T15:06:00.002-04:00

The Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) has received a grant of $350,000 to support faculty development, curricular revision, and online continued educational programs on religious pluralism. The Luce Grant will enable EDS to offer courses on Islam. The Grant will also enable us to share what we are learning at EDS with the wider Episcopal Church and other faith communities.

Serene Jones during her installation in 2008 as the President of Union Theological Seminary in New York announced that preparing students to minister and work in a religiously pluralistic society would be one of her major strategic initiatives. Paul F. Knitter of the Seminary has been a pioneer in interfaith dialogue and John Thatamanil, a new faculty member, has done innovative work on comparative theology.

Last May, Claremont School of Theology received $50 million from David and Joan Lincoln to establish the Claremont Lincoln University to educate Muslim, Jewish, and Christian spiritual leaders. David Lincoln said, “We believe the outcome of this kind of education will be tolerance and respect among religions and the ability to better address global problems where religious cooperation and cooperating are needed to reach solutions and repair the world.”

Harvard Divinity School

I welcome and salute these various initiatives and innovations to enhance interfaith learning. As a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, I have been exposed to very rich and lively discussions of different religious traditions. Though Wilfred Cantwell Smith had retired from Harvard when I entered as a student, he had come back to lecture and his influences were clearly felt. His book The Meaning and End of Religion, published almost five decades ago, remains a classic in the field.

Center for the Study of World Religions

During 1986-87, I had the fortune of living at the Center for the Study of World Religions opposite the Divinity School. John Carman, a well-known scholar on Hindu culture and religion, was the Center’s director. Riffat Hassan, a leading Muslim feminist scholar, and Kurt Rudolph, who studied the Gnostic tradition, lived on the same floor. My five-year-old daughter became close friends with the children of a Sikh and Jewish couple and the young children of a Buddhist priest from Japan. The Center organized different seminars and talks, and I still remember Carol P. Christ came to speak about the Goddess tradition.

In addition to the events of the Center, I benefited from meeting the research associates of Women’s Studies in Religion Program and other women visiting professors from around the world. Mercy Oduyoye taught a course at the Divinity School during my first year there in 1984. She was working on Hearing and Knowing and began to develop an African feminist theology paying close attention to the indigenous African traditions. Mieke Bal spent a year as research associate, and her lecture on the Book of Judges was just brilliant. I also remember listening to Sylvia Marcos, an anthropologist and a pioneer in studying women in Mesoamerican religions.

Harvard-Yenching Library

This interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and multireligious learning has played a critical role in my development as a scholar and teacher. They have nurtured my interest in many fields: biblical studies, the study of religion and culture, and Christian theology.

The Divinity School and the Harvard-Yenching Institute, in close proximity to each other, were my intellectual homes. I had the privilege of studying with some of the most renowned philosophers and historians in Chinese studies. The late Benjamin Schwartz, author of the award-winning The World of Thought in Ancient China, guided my independent study on women and feminism in China. He jokingly said that he was a mild feminist.

One of the world’s leading Confucian scholars Tu Weiming taught me the Confucian and Daoist traditions and served on my dissertation committee. I was very grateful to Paul A. Cohen, a professor at Wellesley College and an authority on Christianity in modern China, who kindly agreed to co-direct my thesis. All these scholars have immense knowledge of philosophy, history, and historiography in the East and the West. They have always encouraged me not to be satisfied with ready-made answers and to search in the gray, in-between areas.

I will be able to share what I have learned about China, the study of religion, and Christianity in the EDS travel seminar to China next summer. My colleague Patrick Cheng will be the co-leader of the seminar and we plan to visit churches, seminaries, Christian organizations, as well as Buddhist temples, a Confucian temple, and the mosque in Xian. I am committed to helping my students to learn about China, a country that is so important for USA and the world in this century. The travel seminar will offer opportunities to learn about different concepts and functions of religion and interactions among different religious traditions in this ancient country.

Steve Jobs May Have Something to Teach Us about Theology

2011-08-26T14:30:00.005-04:00

My first computer was an Apple Macintosh. It is still in my attic.

The year was 1985, and I needed a computer for my graduate work, one that was simple and easy to learn. People around me told me to get a Mac. Before coming to the U.S., I took several classes about using a PC, and that was the age when you had to memorize what F7 or F10 stood for. When I heard that the Mac could do everything simply by clicking a little mouse, I was sold.

I liked my Mac so much that when I returned to Hong Kong, I brought it with me. In an age with the laptop and iPad, one possibly can’t imagine how much trouble that would take. I bought a blue canvas bag that was large enough to pack the whole computer. I had to turn the computer on at the security to show that it was really a computer and not something else. I was traveling with my seven-year-old daughter and I put the bag under the seat in front of her as we flew across the Pacific. She loved it because she could put her feet on top of it.

Not many people used the Mac at the time in Hong Kong. I finally had to give it up because the cost of repair was too high.

I didn’t know that iPod would start a cultural revolution when it debuted in 2001. Since then you could see the ubiquitous white earplugs in people’s ears. The little white gadget looks like “some sort of magical water-washed river stone that you just had to have.” Who dreamed of such a design?

I first saw the iPhone in 2007 in my friend Serene’s living room. It had a red cover and looked smooth and cute. I could still remember Serene’s excitement about how this mobile unit could do all the wonders for her.

I don’t know why you need an iPad when you have a Netbook already. I bought a Netbook before my trip to China because it was less than 3 lbs. But boy, the iPad weighs about half of it and runs much faster. I touched an iPad for the first time when the faculty and students of my school were traveling on a bus to Ian Douglas’s installation as a bishop. We passed the iPad around, giggling like kids sharing a new toy.

The Mac was my only rendezvous with Apple. I don’t have a smart phone and still have not been persuaded that I need a tablet, from Steve Jobs or from Moses. But in the past few days, I was fascinated by reactions from Apple employees, tech geeks, and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak to Jobs’ resignation as Apple’s CEO. The Mac was my first love. You remember your first romance long afterward.

Steve Jobs, a Zen Buddhist who had gone to India to find a guru, may have a lesson or two for theologians. The genius behind Apple insists that function and form must go together. Every commentator speaks about the aesthetics and minimalism of Apple’s design. When Jobs dropped out from Reed College, he went back to audit a calligraphy course and it had forever changed his sensibility. He introduced the different typefaces in the Mac and firmly believes that technology must have a strong aesthetic component.

I wish theologians have a better aesthetic sense when we create our theological systems. Aquinas’ theology has a cathedral-like design, with transepts and side-chapels, flying arches and vaults. Paul Tillich pictured his systematic theology as a mountain, and drew a detailed sketch of the various sections of the work.

Jobs wants us to forget about the technology when we use Apple products. He makes them so intuitive that you can figure out by playing with them. When you see the clock icon on your iPhone, you know what it stands for.

Technology should not stand between you and life, he says. Theology should be like that too. Yet so much theology has been written to make you feel so stupid that you wonder what it is about. This ensures that there are always the theo-novices to depend on the theo-geeks.

But Jobs’ greatest legacy is in the Apple’s slogan—think different. When no one thought that there would be a market for personal computers, he and Wozniak created one from scratch in his garage. When computers were in black and beige colors, the iMac came out in astonishingly bondi blue, bright orange, and lime green.

Think different. God is still waiting to come out from the little boxes we have created. Who will write the first iTheology to start a game change?

World Competition in Sport Metaphors

2011-07-07T20:49:00.004-04:00

With China’s growing economic clout and political stature, Beijing has been talking about China’s “peaceful rise” to great-power status for several years. As China is preparing for leadership change in the fall of 2012, the world is watching whether Xi Jinping, who will most likely replace President Hu Jintao, will bring any policy changes.

Since China overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy last year, economists and China-watchers have been debating when China would overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy. Some have coined the term “Chinamerica” to highlight the close interactions and interdependency between China and the US. Commentators use the term “Beijing Consensus” to describe an alternative model of economic development to the Washington Consensus of market-friendly policies.

Within China, intellectuals and writers from many sectors have debated rigorously the implications of China’s “peaceful rise.” One of the interesting books I have come across is the best-seller 中国梦：后美国时代的大国思维与战略定位（China Dream: Post-American Age’s Mindset for a Big Country and Strategic Positioning).

The author 刘明福 (Liu Mingfu) is a professor of National Security University and Director of the Research Center for Military Construction at the University. Liu, who joined the Chinese army in 1969, argues that China’s dream to be a powerful country has had a long history.

The Chinese monarchy was overthrown in 1911 and the Chinese Republic was established. Even though China was dirt poor at the time, Sun Yat Sen, the father of the Chinese Republic, exhorted his Chinese compatriots to build China to be “the world’s most prosperous and powerful country.” Then in 1955, Mao Zedong has famously said that China has to surpass Britain and catch up with the US. But the Great Leap Forward resulted in famine and disaster.

Liu’s book uses three interesting metaphors to describe the competition among world powers.

· Dueling: No world power would willingly give up its dominance without resorting to violence and war. Different world powers have risen to prominence in modern history: Portugal in 16th century, the Netherlands in 17th, Britain in 19th and 20th, and the USA in the latter part of the 20th century. The replacement of the old world power by the new has often been accompanied by war. The USA became a world power as a result of the two world wars. Dueling is a very cruel form of competition.

· Boxing: The Cold War between the former Soviet Union and the US can be compared to boxing. The Cold War was more “civil” than the world wars: the arms race did not lead to direct military confrontations between the superpowers. In boxing, each party wants to win, but one does not need to kill or eliminate the opponent.

· Track and Field: The competition between China and the US in the 21st century is more like challenges in track and field, instead of dueling or boxing. The motto of the Olympic games is “faster, higher, and stronger.” The rise of China is not to create another superpower, but to help build a peaceful, open, and harmonious world. The development of China will contribute to the economy of the US and benefit the world.

Each of these sports has its own rules; the key question will be who will be setting the rules for world competition in the 21st century? How will the smaller and weaker nations have a say in determining the criteria for an open and harmonious world? What kind of global structures would need to be created to arbitrate the “world games”?

Since China lost the Opium War to Britain in 1842, China has been forced to sign numerous unequal and humiliating treaties. Deng Xiaoping’s socialism with Chinese characteristics has awakened the sleeping giant in the East. His open policies have radically changed the economic and social contours of the most populous country on earth. With economic growth, many Chinese have regained confidence in their country. Books like China Can Say No have become very popular.

Liu’s book plays into the rising nationalistic sentiments of the Chinese. He states that in order to become a world power, China must compete with the US in terms of military power and capability. His hawkish position has been criticized because this will lead to a new round of arms race and the increase of nuclear arsenals.

Nationalism runs very deep in China today. On Chinese web sites, many Chinese bloggers and commentators rush to defend China whenever China is criticized, especially by Western media. A strong China dream has the danger of romanticizing the nation, the people, or the state. It can lead to blind trust and uncritical support of the nation. When this happens, China dream could become nightmare for other countries and peoples.

Hope Abundant Received an Award

2011-06-27T21:08:00.008-04:00

About two and a half years ago I met Susan Perry of Orbis Books at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. I told Sue that the book With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology, one of the first anthologies on Third World women’s theology, was out of date. Since the book’s publication by Orbis Books in 1988, the world has changed so much.

Sue said that she had thought of bringing out a sequel. Unfortunately the original editors Virginia Fabella and Mercy Amba Oduyoye were not able to do so.

I told Sue that I have been teaching a course on Third World feminist theology regularly, and we needed a newer text. Sue asked me if I would be willing to bring out a new volume. I was happy to edit a volume to showcase the works of a newer generation of women theologians from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.

I also wanted to include indigenous women’s voices, since their contributions to the global chorus of feminist theology have often been neglected.

With Passion and Compassion was based on the first intercontinental conference of the women theologians of the Third World in the city of Oaxtepec, Mexico, in 1986. I was away in the United States doing graduate studies and did not attend the meeting. María Pilar Aquino was kind enough to send me some of the photos she took at the meeting, while I was working on Hope Abundant: Third World and Indigenous Women's Theology. Pilar, Mercy, Virginia, and the other participants looked much younger then.

Third World and indigenous women theologians have published a lot since their initial meeting in Mexico. Mercy Amba Oduyoye was instrumental in forming the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians in 1989. The Circle became the primary forum for African women theologians to exchange ideas. One of the aims of the Circle was to encourage the publication of theological works by African women.

In 1988, the Asian Women’s Resource Centre for Culture and Theology was formed in Hong Kong. The late Rev. Sun Ai Lee Park from South Korea played a leadership role in the early years of the Centre. The Centre published the journal In God’s Image and many other books on Asian women’s theology. It is now located in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

The Con-spirando Collective in Santiago, Chile, formed in 1991, provided an avenue for Latin American women to work together and they have devoted their energy to ecofeminist issues. The Collective published a journal Con-spirando.

During my travels in Asia and in the ecumenical circles, I have gathered a lot of materials from Third World women. It was more demanding to find materials from Latin America since the works needed to have been translated. I was fortunate to be able to rely on colleagues such as María Pilar Aquino and Nancy Bedford for suggestions.

I gathered indigenous and tribal women’s theology from India, Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, Palestine, and the United States, though not all pieces went into the book because of limited space. I hope that more work from indigenous women will be available in the future.

Earlier today I was so happy to receive the news that Hope Abundant was awarded second place in the category of Gender Issues by the Catholic Press Association. These awards are presented each year at the Association’s annual convention.

The citation reads: “This is an important book that gathers a new generation of women theologians from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Latin America into the global theological conversation. Filled with powerful, moving insights from both Protestant and Catholic perspectives, the eighteen contributors explore everything from why the exodus story is a story of liberation for some and a story that justifies occupation and genocide for others to how Catholic women in the Philippines are using women’s mystical tradition and new liturgies and symbols to sustain their work for justice. These are faith-filled theological reflections that offer abundant hope in the midst of poverty, violence, oppression, and war.”

I am very grateful for the recognition and I hope that the award will bring wider publicity for the volume. Proceeds from the book will be used to support the Institute of Women in Religion and Culture at Trinity Theological College in Accra, Ghana, founded by Mercy for training African women leaders. I urge you to support their work by buying a copy of this very exciting volume and please visit the Web site for the book at http://HopeAbundant.org.

The Song of Songs in Three Languages

2011-06-14T09:30:00.005-04:00

The Song of Songs is considered one of the most beautiful love poems of all time. For centuries, it has inspired painters, composers, singers, and writers because of its expansive imageries and its dramatic glorification of carnal love. Yet, in Christian worship, we have seldom been exposed to the love poetry of the Bible.

In the past several days, I have had very moving and captivating experience with the Song of Songs. Last week, in my course on Eros, Sexuality, and the Spirit, I introduced the Song of Songs and talked about the interlace between sacred and carnal desire and longing.

The word "poetry" comes from Greek term poiesis, which means forming or making. It is an art form in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities.

For love is as strong as death,
jealousy is cruel as hell;
the lights thereof are lights of fire and flames (8:6)

The sound and cadence of a poem are as important as the meaning of it. To help students appreciate the Song of Songs in Hebrew, I asked the students to listen to Roy White’s recitation of the Song in Sephardic Cantillation manner on YouTube.

Then I asked a male and a female student to recite part of the Song from Marcia Falk’s translation. A poet and a painter, Falk has worked on the Song for many years and her translation combines rigorous scholarship with poetic sensibilities. She tries to capture the full force of female eroticism in this only book in the Bible in which women speak more than half the lines.

“The song expresses mutuality and balances between the sexes, along with an absence of stereotyped notions of masculine and feminine behavior and characteristics,” Falk writes.

Last Saturday, some of my students and I attended the Boston Pride Interfaith Service. The reading from Tanach was taken from Song of Songs 8:1-7. It was first read in Hebrew and then in English. The Rev. Liz Walker, an award-winning television journalist and anchor, spoke of the excessiveness of love in her sermon.

My feast of the Song of Songs continued on, when I went to the Jordan Hall in Boston to listen to Les Voix Baroques from Montreal singing Canticum Canticorum (The Song of Songs) in Latin. I have almost missed this if not for a student telling me that the Boston Early Music Festival is taking place this week.

The program included songs by Roland de Lassus (ca 1532-1594), Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672), and Marin Marais (1656-1728). The music captured the different kinds of voices in the Song: female, male, and a group. Director Stephen Stubbs played the lute and it was wonderful to see his body expand and contract as he played the instrument. I had the feeling that his body was a part of the music. Anyone who has watched Yo-Yo Ma play understands what this feeling is like.

The Jewish people began to interpret Song as a symbolic text describing the love between Yahweh and the people of Israel from the first centuries of our era. Around 400, when St. Jerome translated the text into Latin, Christians had taken the Song to mean the love between Christ and the Church, following the allegorical method.

In “Dialogo della cantica” by Domenico Mazzocchi (1592-1665), Song 1:13 was rendered as

Fasciculus myrrhae dilectus meus Christus est,
Inter ubera mea commorabitum.

(A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved Christ unto me,
He shall lie betwixt my breasts.)

The Hebrew Song does not mention God or religion, and of course nowhere does it refer to Christ!

The evening concluded with an English song, “My beloved spake,” by Henry Purcell (1659-1695), a baroque composer, considered to be one of the greatest English composers.

My beloved spake, and said unto me,
Rise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear upon the earth;
And the time of the singing of birds is come,
Alleluia. (2:10-12)

Stand Up for Transgender Youths

2011-06-11T20:44:00.004-04:00

This morning at the Boston Pride Interfaith Service, Ken and Marcia Garber received the 2011 Pride Interfaith Award. As David Houle of Dignity Boston read the award citation, Ken Garber would not hold back his tears.

CJ, the child of Ken and Marcia, wanted to be a boy since four years old. Ken, a firefighter, believes that parents should love and affirm their child, no matter the gender identity of the child. Marcia and Ken found that the Catholic Church to which they belonged could not quite accept that they had a transgender son. They were tired of hearing that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) people would go to hell.

They became involved in Dignity Boston and turned to the transgender community for support and help when CJ began his gender affirmation process. They have been active in the Massachusetts Commission for GLBT Youth, Mass Equality, and Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Sadly, CJ died of a drug dose at 20 years old, after suffering from years of bullying in school and struggling to find a job.

People around me at the Interfaith Service and I cried as we listened to Ken and Marcia telling their story. As a parent, I could relate to their deep felt pain. We all want to see our children grow up strong and enjoy life. Yet, our society has made it so difficult for CJ and others like him to survive and flourish. I could imagine the teases, snares, and belittlement. . .

Many years ago, after I taught at the Episcopal Divinity School for about two years, the students organized a weeklong evening services for GLBT people. A student Ann told the story of what happened after she had come out to her family as a lesbian. She was only about 13 or so, and her family wouldn’t accept who she was. The next day, her parents put all her belongings on the porch and asked her to leave.

My daughter was around 13 at the time, and I could not imagine doing this to my own child. Why was it so unacceptable to hear that your daughter loved a person of her gender?

Ann’s story opened a window for me to understand the pain and anguish of gay and lesbian youth. Discrimination against GLBT people was no longer something abstract, because one of my students was thrown out of her family simply because of who she was.

I was so moved by Ann’s story and I pledged to do whatever I could to stand in solidarity with GLBT people, so that fewer children would need to go through what Ann had gone through.

Transgender people are particularly at risk in our society. They face widespread discrimination and violence. Currently the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition is pushing for the passage of a bill that will add Massachusetts to the 15 other states that protect transgender people. The bill will include gender identity and expression in the state’s non-discrimination statute and will amend existing hate crime laws to explicitly protect people targeted for violence and harassment.

Ken has spoken at rallies and testified at the State House. Ken and Marcia have not gone back to live quietly in their suburban town. They have turned their pain into courage to stand up for others. We must do our part to stop hate and intolerance and make sure that it gets better for our transgender youths.

Mentors in My Life

2011-06-03T10:41:00.006-04:00

When I told people that I had a woman priest in my teenage years in Hong Kong, they were very surprised. That was back in the 1960s!

Deacon Hwang Hsien-yuin was the vicar of my church even before she became one of two women officially ordained in the Anglican Communion in November 1971. Rev. Hwang was an educator and a priest, and she was the principal of a primary school, while serving as the head of my church. Born into a privileged family, Deacon Hwang received her college education in China and obtained a Master’s degree at Columbia University. This was rare for women of her generation.

I was a youth leader of my church and sang in the choir for our 8 a.m. morning service. After the service and before choir practice, Deacon Hwang would come to lead a short devotion. It was during these short devotions that I first heard a feminist interpretation of the Bible. As she struggled to be ordained as a woman priest, she discussed with us the meaning of ministry and God’s calling to both women and men to serve.

I had a desire to know more about Christian faith while serving in the church. I fondly remember it was Dr. Philip Shen’s three lectures on theology that opened my eyes to the breadth and depth of the Christian tradition. Dr. Shen was a professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He taught courses on Christian classics and philosophy of religion, and was a keen promoter of general education in higher education. In addition, he was a well-known creator of origami.

As a graduate of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, he had received a broad-based theological training. When I left Hong Kong to begin my doctoral studies at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. Shen told me not to hurry back and to take my time. He knew more than I did at the time that education of a person is a very long process.

I had the fortune of meeting Professor Letty Russell in Korea the year before I went to the United States for doctoral work. She was invited to deliver a series of lectures on feminist theology in Seoul and I was invited as her respondent. Letty became a mentor, colleague, and friend. Letty, Katie Geneva Cannon, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and I co-edited the volume Inheriting Our Mothers’ Gardens.

Letty was a keenest supporter and promoter of generations of Third World and racial and ethnic minority women theologians. Many scholars can recount stories of how Letty has helped them in their personal and professional journeys.

It was at Letty and her partner Shannon Clarkson’s home that a small gathering of Asian and Asian American women in theology and ministry was held in the fall of 1984. Letty and Shannon called together several Asian women students studying theology on the East coast and ministers. The network that later became Pacific, Asian, and North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM) was born.

For 12 years, Letty and Shannon served as the network’s advisors, raising and managing funds for us. In 1997 when the Asian and Asian American advisors took over the responsibilities, we had a farewell party for them. I told Letty that it was from her that I learned how to become a mentor, modeling after her example.

During my graduate studies, I had the privilege of studying with Professors Mary Daly and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. I took a course with Mary Daly soon after her book Pure Lust was published and she used the book as a primary text. The class was small and Daly was famous for “not allowing” men in her classes. From her I learned that women had to learn to think independently outside the “sacred canopy”—the male church hierarchy, androcentric regimes of knowledge, and the male reward system.

Daly’s image of life “on the boundary” became a constant reminder of never submitting to the temptation of “fitting in.” Later when I became interested in postcolonial studies, Daly’s teaching has prepared me to think in the “in-between” spaces. Although I have criticized Daly’s work, my respect for her as a pioneer, trail-blazer, and a fierce fighter for truth is enormous. She also taught me that scholarship can be done with a lot of passion and humor.

Elisabeth was teaching at the Episcopal Divinity School when I took her course on Gospel Stories of Women. Her book In Memory of Her was published a few years ago and quickly became a must-read for women in divinity schools. As women were fighting against male systems of knowing and scholarship, some had misgivings about Elisabeth’s book as it is so dense and with so many footnotes. When I discussed this with Elisabeth, she said that she had worries about who would read her book. The male establishment would not take it seriously and the women would find it too hard. But she said, liberating scholarship is liberating. Women have not been encouraged to develop ourselves to be scholars, and we have to claim back the power to become theological subjects.

I went to Elisabeth’s office for my first appointment with her. She listened to the theological project I was interested in pursuing. Some 25 years after, I still remember the advice she has given me. She told me my work would need three paradigm shifts: from male to female, from West to Asia, and from privileged women to poor women. I did not fully anticipate the process of decolonizing of mind that these paradigm shifts would require and that this would be a life-long work.

I am a faculty member of the Asian Theological Summer Institute, held this week at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. This Institute provides mentoring and support for Asian and Asian American doctoral students in the United States and Canada. Yesterday during a seminar, I heard myself telling the students that they had to go through multiple paradigm shifts in their work. And I remember I first heard this from Elisabeth.

Learning takes place in a matrix of relationships, as my former student Alan Hesse has said. I am very privileged and fortunate to have many mentors who have accompanied me in my long journey to become a scholar. I came from a family of modest means and my parents were farmers from China. Without the help of others who have recognized that I might have something to contribute, I would never have been able to dream of who and what I can become. I am full of gratitude to my mentors and teachers and I hope to pass on the wisdom I have learned to others.

Sustainability

2011-05-26T21:17:00.007-04:00

Sustainability is the new buzzword. This morning was Harvard University’s Commencement and you could find recycling bins everywhere on campus. Harvard is the size of a small city with 26 million square feet. It has self-imposed a whopping 30 percent cut of its greenhouse gas emission from 2006 levels by 2016. The University is aiming for a goal of zero waste by 2020.

The word “sustainability” became prominent as a result of the 1987 report of World Commission on Environment and Development of the United Nations, entitled Our Common Future. The report defines sustainable development as “development that meets the need of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Following the report, the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 brought together world leaders, delegations from governments, and NGOs together. I was the coordinator of the theological advisory team of the conference organized by the World Council of Churches at Rio. The Rio Declaration said “we can no longer think of environment and economic and social development as isolated fields.”

Today, people usually talk about sustainability in terms of the three “Es”: Environment, Economics, and Equity. The Center for Sustainability at the University of Kansas puts out this diagram to explain the intersections among the three: Sustainability requires us to rethink the relation between God, human beings, and the world. Instead of human beings having dominion over creation, many scholars and pastors have used the model of stewardship. Biblical scholars have reexamined important insights on creation and the environment. A group of scholars have looked at the Bible from the Earth’s perspective, and issued the Earth Bible Series.

The ecological crisis prompted the development of ecological theology, with representative figures such as John Cobb, Gordon Kaufman, Mary Grey, Heather Eaton, and Rosemary Radford Ruether, just to name a few. Clergy, scientists, and theologians in the Anglican tradition such as Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, Sallie McFague, and Martha Kirkpatrick have also made significant contributions.

I was invited to give a plenary lecture on “The Theology and Philosophy of Sustainability” at a conference of the Colleges and Universities of the Anglican Communion, held this week at the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. I talked about the need for recycling of Christianity: changing our perspective from anthropocentrism to biocentrism.

Anne Primavesi, an Irish theologian, wrote about the “tight coupling” between humans and nature in her book Sacred Gaia. For her the separation of nature and culture does not reflect reality. We need to remember that the Christian mystics have long spoken about their union with God and with nature. Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century described the world as a “cosmic egg” and wrote:

I awaken everything to life. The air lives by turning green and being in bloom. The waters flow as if they were alive. The sun lives in its light, and the moon is enkindled, after its disappearance, once again by the light of the sun so that the moon is again revived. The stars, too, give a clear light with their beaming.

Commencement Sermon

2011-05-19T21:45:00.008-04:00

With the Rev. Dr. Jim Merritt

Commencement is a ritual. It is a ritual about transition. We gather to celebrate and to give thanks to God for the accomplishments of our graduates. We send them forth to transform the world, heal the broken-hearted, and become ministers of reconciliation.

The Gospel passage (Luke 10:1-9) talks about Jesus sending out seventy people to prepare his way. I have long been very suspicious of this passage because it has been taken by Fundamentalists and TV evangelists to mean that Jesus is sending these people to convert non-Christians and save their souls. Some of these people also proclaim that Jesus will come back this Saturday, May 21, to judge the living and the dead.

But this spring semester, I taught a course on Spirituality for the Contemporary World and we read Marjorie J. Thompson’s book Soul Feast: An Invitation to Christian Spiritual Life. She talks about the spiritual yearning of our time and introduces her readers to various Christian spiritual practices. The first one is spiritual reading of Scripture, which she calls “chewing the bread of the Word.” Spiritual reading, she writes, “is reflective and prayerful. It is concerned not with speed or volume, but with depth and receptivity.”

Invited by Thompson, I tried to ease my suspicion and quiet down in order to hear what God may be saying to us through this particular Gospel text.

I began to see that this passage is about a spiritual journey. It is about the persons who are commissioned to embark on a journey and the adventure will be full of roadblocks and difficulties. Through twists and turns, the persons learn to trust in God and not their own abilities or self-worth. Such kinds of stories or myths can be found in the world’s many cultures and religions. The Franciscan priest and spiritual leader Richard Rohr says, “The journey into the mystery of God is necessarily a journey into the ‘unfamiliar.’”

Read through this lens, the Gospel story has many surprises and things unexpected. The sending of the seventy comes after the sending of the twelve in Luke chapter 9. Jesus is sending not only those who would be apostles to do his mission. He is sending many out. The movement that Jesus is about to start is not built by the apostles or future ministers of the church alone, but by people of various gifts and talents. In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, Paul says in order to build up the body of Christ, we would need apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, and people with other gifts (Eph. 4: 11-12).

In ancient times, travelling was full of risks. Jesus sends them out in pairs. I imagine in our modern church, we would need a committee to sort out who is going with whom. The thought of traveling with a co-worker makes us nervous and might even give us a headache. Will we get along? What happens when our styles of doing things are different?

We are so often taught that a leader needs to be autonomous and self-reliant. But Jesus tells these people not to go alone and take a companion with them. When we are weary and sick, don’t we long for someone who can watch over us? Who wouldn’t want to have what the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue has called a soul friend, “a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life?”

Jesus sends them out saying, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” My immediate response was where? Where is the field where the harvest is plentiful? There are so many Americans unemployed looking for work. Some of our graduates might not easily find full time employment.

“Where is God calling me to harvest? Where is the farm, the garden, or the vineyard to which I need to devote my time and energy?” These are recurrent spiritual questions we have to answer throughout our lives. Other people cannot answer for us. The church cannot answer for us.

When Jesus says the laborers are few, he has a sense of urgency. Where are the places that most need you, that you want to commit your life to? It has taken me a long time to figure this out in my own journey.

I did not dream in my early seminary days that I would be working in field of postcolonial theology. Although I was born and grew up in the British colony of Hong Kong, I have not seen the immediate application of postcolonial theory to the study of the Bible and theology. It was not until several years before 1997 when Hong Kong was about to return to China that I began to seriously think of my identity as a postcolonial person. In the summer of 1998, my former colleague Dr. Ian Douglas, now the Bishop of Connecticut, organized a conference of Anglican contextual theologians on our campus. I met with Anglican theologians from other parts of the world—Jenny Te Paa from New Zealand, Jaci Maraschin from Brazil, and Denise Ackermann from South Africa. As we compared notes, I became even clearer than before of the long colonial legacy of the empire on the theology, liturgy, and structure of the Anglican Church and Communion.

There were so few of us at the time looking at the history and legacy of the Anglican tradition from a postcolonial lens and so much needed to be done. I felt then and I feel now that “the harvest is plenty and the laborers are few.”

Jesus forewarns the people he sends out that the journey is going to be treacherous. “I am sending you like lambs into the midst of wolves,” he says. Christian ministry is not for the faint-hearted. The children of this world have learned to trick you and sabotage your noble projects. People will not always like you, if you insist on doing the right thing. What you count as friends might turn out to be your worst enemies.

If the journey is going to be that tough, at least you want to be as best prepared as you can, such as filling your backpack with bread and water, buying the best pair of L.L.Bean hiking boots, and bringing a mobile phone with GPS in case you get lost.

What a surprise to hear that Jesus tells them, “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals.” I can’t help asking, “Is this for real and is it rhetorical license?” Is Jesus demanding too much?

As I reflect more deeply on what “carry no purse, no bag, no sandals” would mean for a spiritual journey, I recall the tradition of holy women and men who have gone to the desert to live in prayer and austerity. They have learned to be a friend of God and not rely on the security of the world.

Suppose after much soul-searching and sleepless nights, you finally decide to embark on this spiritual journey into the “unfamiliar,” what are you supposed to do? You might imagine you are going to slay the dragon, start a revolution, and somehow end up being “the person of the year” on the cover of some magazines.

Here comes the biggest surprise for me in the story. Jesus tells them his mission consists of three simple things: (1) form community through establishing table fellowship with others, (2) take care of the sick and those with physical needs, and (3) proclaim the Kingdom of God has come near.

Our graduates might think that with several years of theological training, they ought to be able to do more challenging tasks. Having given up security and come back to school as a student, forfeiting vacations with family and friends, and writing all those final papers, they might think that they are called to do greater things than these.

Well, during the temptation, Jesus resisted turning stones into bread or jumping down from the pinnacle of the temple. His small movement consisted of building alternative communities, caring for the sick and the marginalized, and subverting the power and authority of ruling elites. It was through doing very simple and seemingly ordinary things that the extraordinary was revealed. The Logos became flesh.

So we send forth our graduates to continue to do these small and mundane things to usher in God’s Kingdom. This ritual is called commencement because your education has not finished. You are going to be continually formed by the people who will open their houses for you and invite you into their midst. As a leader, you will be formed and shaped by the people whom you have been called to serve.

You have to be faithful to the Gospel and always be open to the promptings of the Spirit. Hold on to your visions but remember that unless your dreams are shared by those whom you serve, you cannot change the world alone. Be sure to replenish your energy or qi, and take care of your physical, psychic, emotional, and spiritual well-being. As the late Rev. Peter Gomes, professor and minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church, told the senior class of Harvard undergrads before their commencement in 2004: “Doing what you can is all that worthwhile living is about, so for God’s sake, and your own, get on with it. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

When you are tired and the temptation to give up sinks into your soul, remember the time when God first called you to this place and your excitement when you arrived. Remember that we pray for you and for our graduates regularly at this chapel. We ask you to continue to pray for us. Wherever you go and however hard the journey is going to be, know that you are never alone for you will always be a part of the EDS family and community. We give thanks to God for who you are and we are proud of you and claim you as our very own. Amen.

* Sermon preached at St. John's Chapel, Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 18, 2011.

Osama Bin Laden Is dead. Are We Safer?

2011-05-11T10:43:00.005-04:00

While many Americans feel a sense of relief that Osama bin laden is dead, I cannot but feel a heavy sense of the burden of history. When we look back at the killing of bin Laden ten years from now, will we say that his death has ushered in a period of peace? Or will there be more bloodshed and revenge? Only history will tell.

When I saw the leaders of the most powerful country huddled in a room watching the killing of a man, I had very mixed emotions. Should we call this righteous killing? Or assassination? Osama’s estranged son Omar bin Laden has come out condemning the killing of his father as criminal. Is he justified in saying that?

These are not easy questions because we have entered an era in which war is not conducted in a conventional way. It is no more one nation fighting with another. Instead, it is the U.S. and its allies fighting “the terrorists” who can be found abroad and at home. President Barack Obama decided not to release the photos of bin Laden’s body, because the images might incite more violence.

Bin Laden may be dead, but unless we deal with the root causes that have driven many young people to join the ranks of Al-Qaeda and other militant groups, the world will not be safer.

Shortly after September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush spoke to the Congress and asked, “Why do they hate us?”

President Bush said that the terrorists did what they did because they “hate our freedoms.” But from Jakarta to Cairo, many Muslims and Arabs did not share the President’s view. Hostility against the U.S. had grown in the Middle East, because many felt that they have been unfairly treated by the world’s superpower.

Now bin Laden is dead, it might be worthwhile to revisit what he had said after September 11. Peter Ford of the Christian Science Monitor reported on September 27, 2001:

“And the buttons that Mr. bin Laden pushes in his statements and interviews - the injustice done to the Palestinians, the cruelty of continued sanctions against Iraq, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, the repressive and corrupt nature of US-backed Gulf governments - win a good deal of popular sympathy.”

I condemn the killing of thousands of innocent people at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. My heart goes out to the victims’ families and friends, who find little comfort or closure in knowing that bin Laden is dead. I mourn especially with the children who have forever lost their parents and loved ones.

I do not want to justify what bin Laden has done. Yet, I must honestly ask: What has the U.S done in the past decade to alleviate the suffering of the people in the Middle East and to win over the hearts and minds of the people?

I am sad to say that injustice continues to be inflicted upon the Palestinians. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dragged on, making it difficult for the people of these nations to rebuild their homes and countries. U.S. troops are still in Saudi Arabia. The recent popular uprisings in the Arab world showed that the U.S. had supported many corrupted regimes and strong men. The U.S. had not always been on the people’s side fighting for their “freedoms.”

The most important lesson I have learned from postcolonialism is to read history contrapuntally. The late Edward W. Said taught that we have to learn to read history from more than one side, because histories and geographies overlap and are intertwined.

Americans might be able to forget the long history of British and American involvements in the Middle East. But those who live in those lands cannot afford to forget.

In The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, the eminent British geographer Derek Gregory details the colonialist and Orientalist engagements of the U.S. in these countries. Political pundits and the mass media have created an imagined geography that reinforces the “us” and “them” polemic. He connects the military campaigns launched by America against Afghanistan and Iraq with the campaign of Israel against Palestine.

Most importantly, he sees the extension of the global order as a continuation of the colonial past into the colonial present. Such a colonial present, as we have seen last week, is bolstered by the latest technologically innovation in military weapons.

Senator Barbara Boxer and others have sponsored a bill calling for the withdrawal and redeployment of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan by July 1, 2011. Since the war began on October 7, 2001, about 1,500 American military personnel have died, and more than 10,000 wounded. As of January of this year, the U.S. taxpayers have spent an estimated of $336,000,000,000 for the operation in Afghanistan. We have heard little from the media about the death tolls and casualties of Afghan military and civilians.

It is time to bring the American troops home. It is high time that we invest not in war, but in peace building. Only so, the world will be safer for us and for our children.

Artist's Gift

2011-05-02T08:28:00.005-04:00

“You must come to see your painting,” my friend Benneville Strohecker told me.

He paints watercolors that captures the scenes and rhythms of nature: flowers blooming in the spring, children playing at the seaside, the meditative garden at a convent, and clouds blowing in the wind. He also paints children’s portraits with stories about their lives.

I like watercolors better than oil paintings. The shades of colors in a watercolor remind me of the subtle shades of black and white in a traditional Chinese scroll painted with brush and ink.

There is a story behind Ben’s gift to me.

Last spring I attended a meeting of Anglican women in Hong Kong. Dr. Jenny Plane Te Paa, principal of Te Rau Kahikatea at St. John’s Theological College in Auckland, New Zealand, concluded the closing worship with a poem. She read John O’Donohue’s “Beannacht.”

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

My mind’s eyes feasted on the colors as I listened to Jenny’s evocative reading.
I thought I needed to pass the poem to Ben since I was sure he’d like it. I also introduced Ben to John O'Donohue’s book Anam Cara (Gaelic for Soul Friend). The poem above serves as the preface to the book.

“What is a currach?” Ben asked me.

“I don’t know.” So he looked it up and told me. Currach is a an Irish boat with a wooden frame.

I didn’t pay much attention to this unfamiliar word and thought it was only a metaphor in the poem. But the image and the expression of "currach of thought" obviously has stirred Ben’s imagination. Sometimes you will never know how the seed of creativity is planted in the crevices of the mind.

So yesterday I went to the opening reception for an exhibit of new works by Ben and sculptor and painter Beverly Seamans at the Bethany House of Prayer in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Ben graciously showed me his painting (15.5 x 8) with two small currachs and a section of John O’Donohue’s poem above them. The poet’s words are written in black ink with dashes of yellow, orange, and red in the background.

The catalogue reads: “Bless the Space between Us” (On loan from Kwok Pui Lan). Ben will offer the watercolor to me as a gift after the exhibit.

The Chinese have a saying, “From a thousand miles away I brought and send you a goose feather. The object is light, but my feelings are deep.”

Ben’s gift, completely gratuitous, comes from a friendship I will treasure for many years to come. It comes from an echo of the soul, from a place valuing art as a way of expressing spirituality.

* Watercolors by Ben Strokhecker will be on exhibit till June 14 at Bethany House of Prayer--a ministry with the Sisters of St. Anne-Bethany, 181 Appleton Street, Arlington, MA. Ben's website is http://www.beneville.com/.

Planting Tomato Seeds on Earth Day

2011-04-22T11:32:00.005-04:00

On this Earth Day I am planting hope.

I am going to put the seeds that I have saved from last year’s cheery tomato plant into the soil. I went to Home Depot to get a cherry tomato seedling last year. The tomato plant yielded many juicy and yummy cheery tomatoes in the summer and into the fall. They were so good that I decided to save some seeds to see if I could grow them next spring.

I read in a Chinese newspaper that I can save tomato seeds in two ways. I can save some cheery tomatoes and freeze them in the freezer. I saved two and yesterday I defrosted one of them so that I would still have one left, just in case.

The other way is to take out some seeds from a tomato and dry them, so that they will be ready to be planted in the following season. I will experiment to see if seeds preserved by both methods would germinate.

I first tried to grow vegetables in the spring of 1996, after my family moved into a house we bought in Massachusetts. I have grown up in Hong Kong and there was hardly any land for growing.

So in 1996, we started a garden plot of 3 feet by 12 feet in our backyard and grew tomatoes, lettuce, green peppers, green onions, and beans. I also grew a few basils and thymes, herbs I did not use often but gave very fragrant smell.

The tomatoes and lettuce were so fresh when we used them for our summer salads. The most amazing thing was watching the little seedlings grow and bear fruits. Gardening was something I have never tried before and it opened a new world for my family and me.

After growing for several seasons, my family stopped doing it because we were too busy and the summer months were hot. I had many other things to do in the summer: reading, writing, taking walks, and catching up with my life…whatever that was.

Last June, I taught a June course on God and Creation. Our class went on a field trip to see an organic garden at a monastery, about 45 miles north of Boston. A student of mine was in charge of this organic garden and he explained to us the relation between sustainable farming, food, and God’s providence in very concrete ways. For example, he showed how different plants grow symbiotically together in his garden.

After the June term, it was already late for the planting season. But my husband and I decided to start growing again!

We created a new garden plot of 5 feet by 22 feet. We divided it into 6 beds and grew tomatoes, red and green peppers, zucchini, and butternut squash. I was so glad to be able to grow Chinese bok choy from seeds I bought from Chinatown. Though I had only 8 or 9 not very healthy-looking bok choy plants, hardly enough for two meals, I bragged about my success in the fall.

So this year, I am observing the international Earth Day by doing something simple: plant some tomato seeds. This is a concrete way of bringing awareness to my busy life of the intimate connection I have with the environment.

As I watch the tomato seeds germinate and grow, I will learn not to take the foods I eat for granted. I thank all those who have grown the foods I will eat on this particular day and remember those who have very little to eat or have to go to bed hungry.

Asian Americans Should Care about Immigration

2011-04-08T23:48:00.003-04:00

The public faces of undocumented people in the U.S. are people from central and South America. The Latino group has been leading the effort to demand a path to citizenship and to challenge legislation that would discriminate undocumented immigrants.

Where are the Asian faces? Among the 12 million undocumented people in the U.S., about 1.5 million are Asians. They have come from different Asian countries. Many don’t speak English and work in jobs that others don’t want.

At the annual meeting of Pacific, Asian, North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM) held in Norcross, Georgia, from March 24 to 26, 2011, participants discussed the theme “Immigration, Borders, and Boundaries.”

Anne Joh, a professor at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary set the context by discussing border and boundaries in globalization and the neo-liberal economy. She pointed out scholars such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued that contemporary Empire is increasingly de-territorialized, with capital and labor moving across national boundaries. Yet, Joh said, walls have been constructed to keep people out and to maintain national boundaries, such as the walls in Israel and along the U.S. border.

Among the Asian undocumented immigrants, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people face double marginalization. Elizabeth Leung of the Pacific School of Religion talked about the invisibility of Asian LGBTQ people and the difficulties for them to come out to their community. Since they are undocumented, they cannot access supportive systems and ask for help when they are in need. Leung reminded us that there are more than 2,100 verses in the Bible about caring for the poor. The aliens are included in the category of the poor, and we should be concerned about their welfare.

Helen Kim Ho, a Korean American lawyer who left her practice of corporate law to become the Executive Director of the Asian American Legal Advocacy Center, Inc., challenged the participants to be involved in immigration issues. As a person of faith, she said churches and faith communities have very important roles to play to stand up for the voiceless and to shape the values of society.

Ho said Asian Americans should not remain silent on immigration issues. As a group Asian and Pacific Islanders were the first to be stigmatized in the nation’s immigration law. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed by President Chester A. Arthur, effectively stopped Chinese immigration for ten years and prohibited Chinese to become U.S. citizens. It was the first major law restricting immigration to the U.S.

The Chinese Exclusion Act foreshadowed the other acts restricting immigration in the 1920s. In 1929 the National Origins Act capped overall immigration to the U.S. at 150,000 per year and barred Asian immigration.

It was not until the Immigration Act of 1965 that the national-origin policy was eliminated. Since then more and more Asians immigrated to the U.S. to join their families and to work in various professions. Today, Asian Americans make up 4.6 percent of the population (about 14.6 million people). We are one of the fastest growing racial/ethnic groups (in terms of percentage increase) in the U.S.

Asian Americans have been seen as perpetual foreigners in the U.S. because of the history of racism. The myth of “model minority” and internalized racism make it difficult for some of the Asian Americans to speak up for undocumented Asians. The sense of shame surrounding the issue of illegality and undocumented status further compounds the problems of mobilizing the Asian American community.

Yet speak we must. These undocumented workers work hard, pay their taxes, and contribute to our society. The Bible teaches us to care for those aliens and strangers among us. In a parable in Matthew 25, Jesus said that whatever you did for the least of these, you did it to me. Let us heed the call and stand in solidarity with those who are voiceless and afraid to speak.

Nature in Japanese Art

2011-03-18T16:53:00.004-04:00

Japan is situated in a major earthquake zone. The country suffers from earthquakes and natural disasters frequently. In 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed 70% of Tokyo and 80% of Yokohama. The death toll was 140,000. We have yet to find out the magnitude of the loss of lives and properties in the recent 8.9 magnitude earthquake and tsunami.

I wonder if the precariousness of life is one of the reasons that Japanese artists and poets display such attention and love for nature and its beauty.

The tsunami reminded me of “The Great Wave of Kanagawa” by Katsushika Hokusai, created in the 1820s. This is the first in the series of his woodblock print Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Although it depicts not a tsunami, but an open big wave of the sea, it captures the power and ferociousness of the water.

The impermanence of nature and beauty features prominently in Japanese art: ikebana (生け花 living flowers or the way of flowers), tea ceremony, and poetry.

One of the Japanese poetic forms is haiku (俳句), consisting of 17 moras, in 3 phrases of 5-7-5 moras respectively. The moras are not the equivalent of syllables, but English writers use syllables as their guide. Traditional haiku focused on aspects of the natural world.

The most famous haiku poet was Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). The best known of his work is “The Old Pond”

古池や　蛙飛込む　水の音

fu-ru-i-ke ya (5)
ka-wa-zu to-bi-ko-mu (7)
mi-zu no o-to (5)

Translated as

old pond . . .

a frog leaps in

water’s sound

After the tsunami last week, people wrote haiku and circulated on the Internet to express their feelings and to remember the dead. Here are a couple of them and some are taking poetic license to change the form.

Enraged Pacific

Fire, water, endless destruction

Hope and hopelessness collide

(Nohea)

Big tsunami wave

Washing over everything

Wish it wasn't there

(Alexander Hopkins)

Unanchored ships

Tossed in chaos of

Tsunami’s raw power

(Walterrean Salley)

Praying for Japan

2011-03-16T19:00:00.003-04:00

Watching the videos in which the cars, houses, and fishing boats were blown and carried away by the tsunami in Japan was like watching a horror movie. How could we fathom the huge loss brought by the biggest earthquake in Japan’s history? Thousands of people have died and many are still missing.

Where is God in this? And where can we find the manifestation of God’s love at moments like this?

It always seems cruel to me to find moral and religious lessons out of somebody else’s tragedy. At moments of loss and uncertainty, we rely on the ancient wisdom of people who have experienced and survived many tragedies throughout history.

I remember listening to a rabbi talking about the Holocaust many years ago. When asked, “How can the Jews believe in God after so much loss and suffering of the innocent?” The rabbi said, “We don’t know how, but as Jews, we have been questioning and demanding God for an answer for a long time.”

Throughout the Bible and especially during the exodus, the Jewish people had been calling out to God, demanding God to justify God’s own action. I found comfort and solace in that God allows us to ask these soul-searching questions.

It is not a lack of faith when we argue with God and demand God for an answer. It is precisely faith seeking understanding, a vocation for all of us who are learning and doing theology.

In the Jewish magazine Tikkun, there is a section called “Ask the Rabbi.” After the tsunami that hit Southeast Asia in December 2004 killing more than 220,000, a reader asked how could God have allowed the tsunami to happen. Rabbi Michael Lerner responded: “I don’t know and there are no answers, but only responses to the question. The difference is this: an answer seeks to dissolve the question, a response recognizes the ongoing validity of the question and seeks to remain in connection with it.”

The Rabbi suggested that we should stop thinking of God as a big man in heaven deciding our fates and controlling nature. Instead, he wrote, we should understand “God as the force of healing and transformation in the universe, the aspect of the universe that is the source of love, kindness, generosity, social justice, peace and evolving consciousness, and that this aspect of the universe permeates every ounce of being, every cell, and unifies all being.”

Last Sunday during worship, pastors in Japan tried their best to provide solace for the frightened and anxious people. My friend the Rev. Claudia Genung Yamamoto, a pastor of the West Tokyo Union Church, focused her sermon on Psalm 46: “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.”

Yesterday in my spirituality class, we used the ritual of “touching the earth” introduced by the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. We bowed down, touching the ground with our foreheads, and remembered our ancestors and our spiritual teachers. We bowed and sent our loving energy to people in Japan.

After the disaster, we saw the outpouring of prayers, love, and compassion for the victims and for those who care for the injured, the sick, and people who have lost their loved ones. The orderliness and strength of people lining up for long hours for food, water, and basic necessities impresses us.

We pray for mercy that the nuclear reactors will not explode and spew a radiation crowd like the disaster in Chernobyl. We pray for strength and courage when the Japanese people need to muster their energy to rebuild their society for years to come.

Radical Love by Patrick S. Cheng

2011-03-13T13:54:00.006-04:00

Radical love is “a love so extreme that it dissolves our existing boundaries,” writes my colleague Patrick S. Cheng in his new book Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology.

While queer theory could be highly theoretical and off-putting, Cheng’s Radical Love summarizes the contributions of queer theology in the last fifty years in an accessible and readable way.

So what is “queer”? This term was used in a derogatory way, but has been reappropriated as a neutral or positive term since the late 1980s. Cheng defines “queer” in an inclusive manner: as an umbrella term that refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex people and their allies; as a label that embraces transgressive actions against societal norms, with respect to sexuality and gender identity; and as a term used to subvert and erase boundaries especially in queer theory.

After tracing the genealogy of queer theology, the book proceeds to discuss the three persons of the Trinity, following the framework of ancient creeds. God is the sending forth of radical love, Christ can be seen as the recovery of radical love, and the Holy Spirit as the return of radical love.

Following queer, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theorists, Cheng questions the rigid boundaries such as the East and the West, homosexual and heterosexual, male and female, and divine and human. He argues that Christian theology is a queer enterprise, destabilizing all kinds of fixed binary categories.

Queer theologians insist that gender identity and sexuality are social constructs, and these constructs are often deployed to provide sanctions for the status quo. To “queer” is to challenge “common sense” and to render what is hidden, transparent.

For example, the Roman Catholic Church has used Natural Law to justify its arguments in favor of heterosexuality and procreation. But biologist Bruce Bagemihl in his book Biological Exuberance shows that hundreds of animal species engage in homosexual, bisexual, and transgender behavior.

While feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether has questioned, “Can a male savior save women?” queer theologians go a step further to queer the gender and sexual identity of Jesus.

Jesus, as the embodiment of radical love, crosses sexual boundaries. Nancy Wilson and others have shown that Jesus was sexually attracted to both men and women: Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, the beloved disciple in John, and the nude young man in Mark 14:51-52. The late queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid portrays a Bi/Christ that challenges our fixation on binaries.

I suspect many readers will find the portrayal of Jesus crossing gender boundaries even more challenging. Virginia Mollenkott writes about the intersex Jesus Christ, that Jesus has two X chromosomes (from Mary), yet phenotypically male. Justin Tanis suggests that Jesus’ life experience parallel that of many transgender people.

Furthermore, Elizabeth Stuart argues that the body of Christ is the church, which consists of a multitude of genders sexualities. Baptism and Eucharist reveal that gender and sexual identities are not of ultimate concern.

The book might remind some readers of the “boundary war” among feminists in the mid-1990s. While feminists such as Marie Fortune argued for clear boundaries in their work against sexual abuses in the church and workplace, Carter Heyward decried that rigid boundaries could also betray us and reinforce hierarchical relationships.

In Cheng’s book, binary distinctions and hierarchical constructs are overcome because of radical love. Sexual abuses and oppressions of all kinds are clearly contradictory to radical love. But love without justice is blind. I would like to see more discussions on how to protect radical love and how to differentiate radical love from love that goes awry, and from abuses that masquerade as love.

One of the strengths of the book is that it touches on all major doctrines of Christian theology: revelation, trinity, creation, sin, atonement, church, saints, sacraments, and eschatology (the last things). It showcases the breadth of the theological output of queer theologians. The book includes further study questions and a lengthy bibliography. It will be a very good resource to be used in the classroom and in church and small groups.

I hope that the publication of Cheng’s book will stimulate more discussions on queer theology among the younger generation, especially among the racial and ethnic minorities. Although Cheng has included racial and ethnic minority authors, their voices are often drown by those of white authors’. I hope that more work will be available that explores the intersectionality of gender, race, class, sexuality in our changing world politics.

Preparing Students for the Pacific Century

2011-03-11T11:26:00.005-05:00

“How do we as theological educators prepare students for the Pacific Century?” I asked the faculty of Brite Divinity School at the Texas Christian University at Forth Worth, Texas. The twenty-first century has been dubbed the Pacific Century. While politicians, economists, and social scientists pay a lot of attention to the rise of China and India, what do we need to do to prepare students to be future ministers and civic leaders?

I spent two days with the faculty and students of Brite Divinity School and the Department of Religion of Texas Christian University at the invitation of the Asian (Korean) Church Studies Program. The animated discussion on transnationalism and theology in the Asia-Pacific prompted me to think more about the question I have raised.

Many theological schools in the United States have not positioned themselves to face the challenges of the twenty-first century. Currently we have three major geopolitical blocs shaping the future of the world: North America, the European Union, and Asia-Pacific. But our theological curriculum is very outdated, leaving the Asia-Pacific largely out of its scope.

There are historical and social reasons why theological schools have not caught up with the shifting geopolitics:

· The limitation of disciplinary boundary. Faculties are trained in specific fields, and some do not think Asia-Pacific matters in their field and should be included in their syllabus.

· Theological faculties are ill equipped. Many of the current theological educators do not feel equipped or prepared to talk about the Asia-Pacific, with its complexities and diversity.

· Asian and Asian American faculties feel marginalized. Tokenism is still an important problem. The one or two Asian or Asian American members of the faculty feel that they are the “designated” experts, called upon to manage diversity and to interpret Asia from Japan all the way to India!

· Not sufficient Asian or Asian American students. In some theological schools, Asian students, usually Koreans, make up a significant percentage of the student body. But there is a lack of students from other Asian countries to embody the diversity that is Asia. In other schools, Asian or Asian American students represent only a tiny minority of the student population.

· The Asian “ethnic” churches are seen to be conservative. In the debate of issues such as homosexuality in U.S.A. and Canada, Asian “ethnic” churches are perceived to be conservative. Progressive seminaries find it hard to build relations with these churches.

While I do not want to underestimate these barriers, I want to argue that theological schools need to be forward-looking.

· Teaching for a changing world. Preparing students for the twenty-first century does not simply mean including Asia-Pacific in the curriculum. It means broadening students’ worldview to include a global perspective. Students need to know about the formation of “Chinamerica” and its impact on the world and especially on poorer countries.

· Broadening the definition of theological competency. Some schools have included globalization in its requirements. This is a good first step. But it is not enough to ask students to take courses to fulfill this requirement, while the “traditional disciplines” remain largely unchanged. I would like to see global concerns included across the curriculum, in worship and liturgy, as well as in the culture of the school.

· Retooling and diversifying the faculty. Theological schools need to provide resources and incentives for faculty to re-imagine how their fields address the twenty-first century. It is also not enough to have a few tokens of racial and ethnic minorities or international professors to be the spokespersons and champions of diversity.

· The “silent” Asian students in the classroom. Some Asian students do not speak up in class because of language barriers and their socialization process. Instead of treating them as second-class citizens in the classroom, how can faculty and students engage in meaningful conversations about multicultural pedagogy? A useful resource is a report on Asian and Asian American pedagogy and teaching materials offered by a research team.

· Religious diversity. We must help students understand the challenges of religious pluralism and the religious actors in international politics in the global era. I recommend Thomas Banchoff’s Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics.

· Beware of learning opportunities in the community. Theological schools should encourage students to take advantage of learning opportunities about the Asia-Pacific offered by universities and the community. Strategic alliance with Asian and Asian American religious and civic leaders can be fostered.

Womanist Pedagogy

2011-03-06T20:43:00.005-05:00

American schools are as segregated as before Dr. Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement. How can we help to create space in the classroom such that issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality can be discussed?

Three African American professors discussed the vision and concerns of womanist pedagogy at the Southwest Regional Meeting of the American Academy of Religion this morning in Dallas, Texas. “Womanism” is a term used by Alice Walker in her book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose to describe the perspective and experiences of African American women.

Professor Keri Day, Director of Black Church Studies at Brite Divinity School at the Texas Christianity University, spoke of moral imagination as a form of moral action. At a time when white male Eurocentric knowing is still the norm in many schools, she called attention to the ways imagination can contribute “to evoke new worlds,” as Toni Morrison has said. She used the work of Paulo Freire to discuss consciousness raising and critical awareness of the complexity of the world.

Engaging the work of Michel Foucault, Professor M. Francyne Huckaby of College of Education of the same university, spoke of creative chaos and seducing power in liberating pedagogy. Foucault has talked about the technology of the self and governmentality of power. Dr. Huckaby emphasized that within relation of power, there is also the relation of vulnerability. Power is never final or total. Womanist pedagogy can help students understand the underside of power and use it creatively for social change.

Professor Melanie L. Harris cited the work of her colleague Jack Hill to discuss teaching for diversity.* Hill offers several pedagogical steps, including: (1)acknowledge your own social location, (2) deal with resistance, (3) dismantle “safe spaces of niceness” in order to promote transformation, (4) deal with conflict with an ethic of care, and (5) share power as a way of creating a communal context of learning.

In her response to Hill’s work, Dr. Harris discussed her use of womanist pedagogy in the classroom, adopting the critical insights of Katie G. Cannon, Marcia Riggs, and Emilie Townes. Cannon, a pioneer in womanist ethics, stresses the dismantling of outmoded and conventional knowledge and demystifying racist and sexist ideologies. Riggs models the commitment to theory and praxis in her book Plenty Good Room. Emilie Townes uses Toni Morrison’s metaphor of womanist “dancing mind” to describe the sacred moment of learning between teacher and student.

In the discussion following the panel, participants raised the question of how might people of other social locations learn from the womanist approach. A white participant wants to use some of the critical insights in negotiating differences in her predominantly black church.

A black male student asked how male professionals might support the work of womanists. One of the panelists responded that it is important for black male professors to continue to lift up the voices of womanists, and not just learn about them when they are writing their dissertations.

A black woman who graduated from divinity school and is teaching in public school asked if the womanist scholars are bringing their pedagogy to the black church and community. It is often a challenge to be a scholar and activist at the same time. Dr. Day's Black Church Studies program seeks to bridge the gap between academia and the black church community.

*Jack A. Hill, “Fighting the Elephant in the Room: Ethical Reflections on White Privilege and Other Systems of Advantage in the Teaching of Religion,” Teaching Theology and Religion 12, no. 1 (2009): 3-12. Followed by responses by Melanie L. Harris and Hjamil A. Martínez-Vázquez.

War on Women in America

2011-03-04T22:55:00.003-05:00

The Texas House of Representatives approved a measure yesterday, which will require women seeking an abortion to first get an ultrasound. They would view the sonogram, hear an explanation of the image and listen to the heartbeat, if it is audible.

Texas is one of the several states in which additional restrictions on abortion are being considered. The Republican Party is waging a war against American women and trying to curtail four decades of women’s progress.

The civil war in Libya, the soaring gas prices, and a possible government shutdown in Washington might have gotten most of the people’s attention. But women must be vigilant to protect their rights.

Since the Republicans have become the majority in the House of Representatives and gained many seats in state elections, they are trying to push a wide range of agenda that targets women. The Republican effort, if successful, would:

· Redefine rape to make it more difficult for victims to get justice
· Slash health-care funding
· Further restrict access to family planning and birth control
· Lower pay and benefits in predominantly female professions.

For a time, the American economy was so bad that politicians had to focus on jobs and the revival of the economy. Now the Republicans, especially the conservatives, want to resume the cultural war.

The House has passed a bill to cut federal funding for family-planning services. They want to eliminate the program called Title X, which has provided millions of women with preventive care since 1970, when President Richard Nixon signed it into law. Furthermore, they want to stop all federal funds from supporting care through Planned Parenthood’s more than 800 health centers across the country.

The House resolution will also slash funding for international family planning and reproductive health care. It would also reimpose the global “gag” rule, which restricts federal money to any group that even mentions abortion. President Bush has imposed such restrictions when he ascended to power. President Obama has lifted it, but the Republicans want to reimpose it.

The Republican bill also cuts funding for prenatal health care for low-income women and for children’s health programs.

But women’s groups have begun to take action and speak out. The Democratic Women’s Working Group and the National Organization of Women have called the Republican measures anti-women. The Republican Majority for Choice also starts a campaign to restore Title X.

The church and faith communities must stand in solidarity with poor and low-income women to ensure that all will receive adequate health care. We must speak out now, otherwise the conservatives will be emboldened to push their ideological agenda.

Postcolonial Conversations in Canada

2011-03-03T10:19:00.004-05:00

St. Andrew’s College in Saskatoon, Canada, invited me to be their speaker for their Winter Refresher 2011. St. Andrew’s is a theological school of the United Church of Canada, formed in 1925 by the amalgamation of the Methodist, Congregationalist, and Presbyterians. The Winter Refresher brought alumni, clergy, and lay leaders together for three days of worship, lectures, and discussions.

St. Andrew’s has a special place in my heart because my first theology professor Dr. Paul Newman became a professor of theology at St. Andrew’s after he returned from Hong Kong as a missionary.

I have never been to Saskatoon before and I know that it is cold. When I left Boston, the temperature was 27 degree (F). I checked the weather forecast for Saskatoon, and saw the temperature would drop to -17 degree (F) at night during my stay! Though the weather was harsh and unwelcoming, the warm hospitality of the people at St. Andrew’s made my visit very enjoyable.

Canada is a settler country and postcolonial conversations center on the painful history between the white settlers and the First Nation peoples. The First Nations’ peoples make up about 2.23% of the Canadian population.

The United Church of Canada, a progressive denomination in Canada, has apologized to the First Nations’ peoples for the church’s role in imposing European values. In 1998, the Church apologized for its complicity in the Indian residential schools system. The residential schools separated children from their families and many cases of sexual and physical abuse occurred in these schools.

In a panel during the Winter Refresher, Professor Geraldine Balzer of the University of Saskatchewan spoke about the importance of narratives in shaping our identity. She urged Canadians to revisit and re-tell their stories of origin and to recognize the sense of loss of the people of the First Nations. In recent years, First Nations peoples have moved to reclaim some of the indigenous names of their places. Geography and land shape their culture and sense of belonging.

The United Church of Canada in the last decade has expressed great concern over the impact of Empire and economic globalization. The report “Living Faithfully in the Midst of Empire” in 2006 analyzed the complicity of the church in empire and called the church to repentance and action. From 2009 to 2011, the church’s mission theme is “Living for the Earth: Choosing Creation over Empire.”

I had the opportunity of meeting some of the students who had studied my work. Some of them are preparing for diaconal ministry in the church. They are trained in Christian education and ministry for justice. We discussed issues such as hermeneutics of suspicion, interfaith dialogue, the emergent church, Christian identity in the modern world, the politics of multiple identities, and the postcolonial Jesus.

I enjoyed the music and worship and have made many new friends, since people came as far as Victoria and New Brunswick. It was an invigorating experience and I got to know more about the United Church of Canada.

Why I Like The Economist Magazine

2011-02-27T13:42:00.007-05:00

Among the newsweekly, The Economist is the one that the global elite read. Newsweek has been sold by The Washington Post Company and we are not certain if Tina Brown will be able to turn it around. In the shrinking market of the weekly news magazines, The Economist is doing much better than its competitors.

I started reading The Economist since last year for it was sent to me for free. The frequent miles program of an airline gave me a free subscription and I have enjoyed reading it. When the free subscription ended, I became a paid subscriber.

The Economist has a circulation much smaller than Time and Newsweek. Time has a circulation of 3.3 million (down from 4.1 million in 2000) and Newsweek has 1.6 million (down from 3.1 million in 2000). The Economist had only about 823,000 for the first half of 2010 and sold 52,000 on the newsstand each week. Its subscription rate at $127 is several times more than that of Time and Newsweek.

The Economist stands out among the newsweeklies in terms of its global reach. Each issue has coverage on the world this week, the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa. While Time and Newsweek tend to focus more on U.S. news, The Economist told you something about Uganda’s election, the French in London, the Swedish company Ikea, and gambling in Singapore in last week’s issue.

With the information overload, it is good to have a magazine that provides a snapshot of what is happening in the world. The Economist’s reporting is short and to the point.

I also like The Economist because China features quite prominently in its coverage. Last year, when Xi Jinping became the designated successor of Chinese President Hu Jintao, The Economist had a detailed report of who this rising star is.

The Economist is a British journal and has its own biases. But it provides a lens for me to look at China from a different angle. For example, we know China has overtaken Japan as the world’s second largest economy. But exactly how large is this? The Economist matches the Chinese provinces with countries in terms of GDP, population, and exports. I didn’t know that Guangdong’s GDP is almost equivalent to Indonesia’s. The output of Beijing is as big as the Philippines and Shanghai's output is equivalent to Finland's.

I am also impressed by the occasional special reports, which provide in depth coverage on a certain topic. When I taught a course on liberation theology last semester, I was able to use the special report on Latin America.

In the current issue the Special Report on the future of food asks whether we will have enough food to feed the world’s 9 billion people in 2050. I learned that currently the world produces more than enough to go around. The major reason for famines is not shortage of basic foods, but other factors such as wages, distribution, wastes, and politics. To be able to feed the increasing population, one of the key areas to consider is how to balance the production of crop for food and for biofuels. The United States, the European Union, and Japan all want biofuels to supply 10% of energy demand for transport by 2020.

As an economic and business magazine, The Economist has the interests of corporation and private enterprise in mind. Yet its ideological stance is much less conservative than the Wall Street Journal’s. It chastises the European countries for not speaking more powerfully in support of Arab democracy. The EU is accused of being preoccupied with stability in the Middle East and migrants not landing on their shores, than siding with democracy for the Arabs.

As I watched the news from major American media outlets about the uprising in North Africa and the Middle East, the focus has been what this would mean for the USA. The Economist at least provides a wider angle to look at the world.

The Emergent Church Movement in the UK

2011-02-26T10:42:00.006-05:00

The Rev. Ian Mobsby of the Moot Community is coming to my school to speak and preach this week. The Moot Community is a new monastic community in central London, which develops a rhythm of life combining worship, mission, and community.

Mobsby has over 20 years’ experience of working with various emerging and fresh expressions of church and lectures internationally on these topics. He serves on the core team of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Fresh Expressions team.

In his book Emerging and Fresh Expressions of the Church, Mobsby examines the postmodern and high tech consumerist culture and describes the development of a new mysticism as a form of spirituality for what he calls a “post-religion” culture.

Church membership and attendance in the Church of England have been falling sharply. Fifty years ago, over half of the population in England would go to church. A report on “Churchgoing in United Kingdom," published in 2007, shows that about 15% go to church at least once a month.

The search for new forms of church is urgent. Mobsby wants to move away from the established church model, or the church of the Christendom, to church models that emphasize the mystical and sacramental dimensions.

Mobsby and Steven Croft coedited the book Fresh Expressions in the Sacramental Tradition in the “Ancient Faith, Future Mission” Series. It includes an essay by Paige Blair, an alumna of the Episcopal Divinity School, on U2charist.

Mobsby contributes an essay on the new monasticism, which he describes as an outward facing, missional movement. It has the path of withdrawal, retreat, and sanctuary as well as a path of journey, presence, and engagement. This new monastic movement has the following characteristics:

· Simplicity in a context of complexity. People living in these communities keep minimal possessions and maintain a spiritual rhythm of life. Owning and spending less means they do less harm to the environment.

· Sacramental understanding of time. The binary division of the sacred and secular is challenged. There is a new appreciation of what Barry Taylor has called the sacralization of culture. The Moot Community develops a rhythm of life which consists of six elements: presence, acceptance, creativity, balance, accountability, and hospitality.

· Prayer. Contemplative prayers and daily prayers are seen as source and inspiration.

· Mission. Premodern friars provide care for the sick and the poor. Modern monastics engage in missions to serve the economic poor and spiritually impoverished.

· Love for the Earth. Monastics view all life as holy and live close to the earth.

Some people in the UK have criticized the emergent and new expressions movement. Some question whether the movement has sufficiently differentiated what is “in culture and not of culture.” Others are not sure how the new expressions are related to the old.

In the U.S. the emergent church is predominantly white. I am eager to learn more about this movement in the UK and to see how it has combined the missional and the spiritual to serve the poor and revitalize the old church.

Poem for Theological Education

2011-02-25T20:00:00.008-05:00

Today the trustees, faculty, and administration of my school spent the afternoon talking about why we teach what we teach. Our facilitator used this poem to begin the conversation. I found it very helpful and want to share with you.

Connections

We learn to make connections -
between ancient texts and modern minds
between Codex Sinaiaticus and the internet
between Pew, Pulpit and Public Presence
between the then-Jesus and the now-Christ
between the roller-coaster of human emotion
and the steady devotion of the disciple
between the local congregation and the universal church
between orthodoxy and the adventurous spirit.

So we prepare for ministry
that we may be those who connect
the once-only and the always of God
for healing, hope and grace.

It's a costly business,
in time, talent, money, family,
whether in a little Bible school
or an ancient university,
in distance learning or large seminary,
for in all theological education
we are slowly becoming
what we were called to be,
and that takes a lifetime.
--Bernard Thorogood

12 Tips to Improve Your Academic Paper

2011-02-24T21:20:00.005-05:00

As a teacher I have read many students’ papers and conducted writing workshops for students. I offer these simple tips if you are a budding writer.

· Choose a manageable topic. A strong paper is one that is focused and shows the author has something to say. You can cast the net wide when you fish for a topic, but once you know more about the subject, you have to narrow it down.

· Start with a strong beginning. Journalists usually start with a story as a hook. Make it enticing for your reader.

· Provide a clear road map. What is the paper about? Why does it matter? What do you want to do? How are you going to do it?

· Use your own words. An academic paper does not mean that you should hide behind other authors’ words.

· Develop a narrative arc. I learn this from fiction writing. Why is the paper divided into different sections? What drives the arc? Where is the climax and where is the tension? How is the end related to the beginning?

· Don’t just cut and paste. When you cite other people’s words, make sure they fit the context of your paper. Read your paper without the quotes once to see if your arguments are clear.

· Check the direct quotes. Make sure you quote correctly (before you return the books).

· Always re-write. Even professional writers can’t do it right the first time. It is often when you’ve come to the end of your paper that you really know what you're trying to say. So leave time for re-writing and editing.

· Follow the style sheet. Your work will not be taken seriously if your notes do not conform to the “academic convention.”

· Read poetry and literature. I am sorry to say that many of the theology books are quite dry. You need to read outside the field to write well.

· Ask someone to read over it. You have worked on your paper for so long and can use a fresh pair of eyes.

· Never stop learning to write. It is a craft to be honed.

So What's for Lunch

2011-02-23T15:15:00.012-05:00

Lunch means eating rice. This was the way I was brought up in Hong Kong. So I was surprised to see that lunch could mean so many things when I first arrived in Boston.

I still vividly remember the dean of my theological school walking passed by Harvard Science Center, eating a pretzel on his way during lunchtime. My fellow students brought an apple, pieces of carrots, or nuts to eat for lunch. Others had muffins, potato chips, and every kinds of niceties which I would call snacks.

Food has become a major war in the United States. On the one hand, Michael Pollan admonishes us to “eat real food.” On the other hand, the agribusiness and fast-food chains want to entice us to eat much more than real food.

Today, Mark Bittman of the New York Times has joined the fray. His target was McDonald’s “bowl full of wholesome”—also known as oatmeal. Instead of just plain 100% natural oatmeal, McDonald has added many more ingredients. To be honest, Bittman says, the fast-food chain should label it as “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

You can’t have plain oatmeal, just as you can’t simply have rice. Have you been to restaurants and fast-food stores that serve fried rice, curry rice, rice with raisins and nuts? You have to ask if you want white or brown rice.

Americans have so many choices in food. Yet most of the food is of such poor quality. During my recent trip to Sweden, my host took me to a bakery and the aroma of the bread was just delightful. People lined up to buy fresh-baked bread after work. We went to a fish store to buy soup with fish and clams, freshly prepared for the day. It tasted delicious, and much less salty than soup served in the U.S.

I don’t know why Americans put so much sugar and salt in their food. When I first looked at an American cookbook, I thought something was wrong with a cake recipe. It said one cup of sugar. My goodness, you can use this amount of sugar for several months of Chinese cooking. When I told my friends I’d cut the amount of sugar in the recipe to half, if not to one-third, they rolled their eyes in disbelief.

I have a conspiracy theory about why so much sugar and salt are added to food. When the food you eat is so sweet and salty, you have to drink a lot of sodas—alas, not water.

The popular sodas have so much sugar. A 12-ounce can of Coke contain s 39 gr ams of sugar, equivalent to nine-and-a-half sugar cubes. A 20-ounce bottle contains sixteen-and-a-half cubes!

Mrs. Michelle Obama is waging a campaign to provide healthier lunches in schools as one of the steps to address childhood obesity. The federally-funded school program feeds 31-million low-income American children a year. She wants to increase the amount of fruit and vegetables on the school-lunch trays. But the prices of these products have increased significantly. Even if money can be found to fund the proposal, she faces an uphill battle to convince American children to eat healthy food.

My mother has told her children to eat fresh food and avoid canned food and preservatives. We learned to drink green tea when we were young. I would just stick to her sound advice.

Improvisation in Teaching

2011-02-21T17:24:00.003-05:00

I am going to direct a teaching workshop for Asian and Asian American faculty this summer. As the staff gathered to plan for the workshop, we discussed the important role improvisation plays in teaching.

Since it is improvisation, the result cannot be foreseen.

I once attended a workshop led by Dr. Ysaye Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock. She divided the participants into different groups. Each group would sing different notes with different rhythm. When she put all the groups together, the result was amazing.

I thought I could try this in my classroom. We sang the simple tune “Veni Spiritus” with the women singing the melody and different groups doing the harmony. It worked out quite well.

I invited the class to sing at worship, and asked other students to participate. Before the service, I said that they could improvise and add other harmony, when the Spirit moved them. The Spirit was too energetic that day. The music director, not knowing what we were doing, began to frown and wondered when this would end.

We had a Both/And show in the spring, a kind of annual talent show in the school. A group of students decided to re-create the moment at chapel. We laughed so loud. I guess I had at least restored fun in learning.

Another time, my improvisation turned out much better. I organized a meeting for several graduating seniors to share they journeys and their plans for the future. At the end of the session, I could easily ask the school’s President or a faculty member to say a concluding prayer. I decided on the spot that the prayer should be a collective one.

When I said, “Dear God, we pray that you will give them…” I asked the audience to join in. Instead of saying “wisdom,” “joy,” “strength” one by one, many said different words simultaneously. We repeated this several times using different bidding. The chorus of good wishes and prayers was deeply moving.

Then there was one time that I really had to improvise.

I was invited to deliver a lecture at a university. After I have climbed the several steps onto the stage, I could not find my lecture notes on the podium. I thought I had left them there when I tried out the Powerpoint.

What to do?

Without losing a moment, I said, “The topic we are going to discuss is an interesting one and I am sure you all have different opinions. I invite you to talk with your neighbor for 3 minutes before we begin.”

Then I quietly walked down the stage and found my lecture notes in my handbag.

When I got up the stage again, I invited two students to share with the audience what they had said. These students felt so proud! No one seemed to have noticed that this exercise was unscripted.

In my long teaching career, there have been embarrassing moments, awkward moments, and moments I would rather forget. Often it is the least expected moment that I enjoy most.

Root and Route

2011-02-20T22:24:00.006-05:00

I am sitting at the Indianapolis airport drinking my favorite Earl Grey tea. I have to wait for several hours for my flight to return home after a conference.

“Home” is contested term in postcolonial discourse. One of the members of the conference was born in Kenya. She immigrated to Canada and now teaches in California. When we asked her where home is for her, she had to give a long answer.

Anthropologist James Clifford uses the metaphors of “root” and “route” to talk about culture and identity. Root stands for the place of origin and community of belonging. Route is about travel and transition. Some people embark on the journey voluntarily: visiting relatives and friends, taking a business trip or vacation, going on a pilgrimage, and spending a semester abroad. Others are not so lucky. They are displaced from their homeland, forced to emigrate, and uprooted as refugees or asylum seekers.

Root and route can be real and imaginary. I have met devout Tibetan Buddhists in the U.S., who consider Shangri-La their spiritual home, though they have never set foot there. Others are so fond of the Native American tradition that they feel an affinity when they visit Native lands and reservations. There are also the Indian wannabes who imagine they are Native in another life.

Many of us enjoy being armchair travelers. A popular article published earlier in the year in The New York Times recommended 41 places to visit in 2011. Many of us cannot afford to visit these faraway places. But we can imagine climbing up the Lin Yin temple on West Lake in Hangzhou, China, enjoying a soothing bath in the thermal springs in Iceland, or sampling seafood in Melbourne.

Some places are better left to the imagination, because we might be disillusioned when we actually go there. I had high expectations for my first trip to Jerusalem. The holy sites were so full of people. The conflict between the Israeli and the Palestinians was so palpable. The city of peace had become a city of animosity.

Postcolonial discourse dwells on the in-between spaces. Feeling out of place and unsettled can make one constantly alert. Having grown up in the British colony of Hong Kong, the most jarring experience was communicating with my Chinese teachers in my high school in English. Stuart Hall is right when he says that colonization makes one feel “diasporic” even at home.

For a long time, the Jewish people were dispersed and in diaspora. They have longed for returning home. The establishment of the State and Israel created many new issues for progressive Jews in the U.S.

I appreciate Jonathan Boyarin’s insistence of maintaining a diasporic consciousness even though a Jewish state had been established. A diasporic existence forces people to look at culture, nation, peoplehood from radically different vantage points.

Sometimes one needs to travel away to be able to see more clearly what one’s root is. This can be physical, cultural, or even spiritual.

Why Would People Like Glenn Beck

2011-02-19T22:04:00.004-05:00

I do not know why people would tune in to listen to people like Glenn Beck.

I am attending a conference at Wabash Center in Crawfordsville, Indiana. There is an outspoken conservative group at Wabash College, a men’s liberal arts college of 850 students. This group published a magazine The Phoenix, which I found this morning on the coffee table.

A senior student Adam Current published an essay in it entitled, “Out of the Closet: Why I like Glenn Beck.”

He asks, “How is it that a critically thinking Wabash Man could possibly enjoy the likes of Glenn Beck?” My interest was piqued.

He lists three reasons:

Beck is entertaining: “Beck’s politically incorrect humor is reason enough to tune in.”

Beck dares to say things that others don’t dare. “Beck’s appeal is largely derived from his truly unique narrative.”

Beck is the workingman’s epistemologist. He asks his audience to check out his claims instead of simply taking his word.

Though I might disagree with Current, I find his criticism of the Left intriguing. He charges, “The Left’s puritanical enforcement of political correctness is as hysterical as it is pathetic.” The Left, he continues, have created their “own political dialect, cluttered with forbidden words.”

After Senator John Kerry lost the presidential election, many pundits offered statistics, diagnoses, and commentaries. Cognitive scientist and linguist at Berkeley George Lakoff’s comments caught my attention. In Don’t Think of an Elephant! He argued that the Democrats lost before they have allowed the Republicans to frame and control the language of the issues.

When the conservatives used the positive terminologies of “pro-life,” “tax relief,” and “family values, it was harder to win over the issues. People voted with their values and framing the moral terrain was crucial.

When the Republicans won a landslide in the election last November, Lakoff observed, the conservatives had think tanks and a vast communication system dominating the wavelength. They won over the independents—the “bi-conceptuals” who have both the progressive and conservative conceptual systems in their brains. They tend to apply these systems to different issues. The conservatives were able to appeal to them by using language such as government takeover and death panels. President Obama had no overriding narratives in his first two years, he said.

In a very interesting article, “Head, Heart, Guts, and Gonads: Getting Dirty in the Rhetoric War,” Robin Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley chastises the progressives for not using rhetorical strategy effectively.

She points out the head is the seat of logic. The heart is the locus of feeling. The guts are about fear. The gonads are about sexual identities. Transgressing sexual boundaries creates terror.

“The left likes to argue to the head; conservatives know that the further down you go, the more persuasive you will be,” she argues.

In order to win, rhetorical strategy is important. But you still need people to tune in. Politically incorrect humor helps, because news has turned into entertainment in the U.S.

I want to come out of the closet: I like Jon Stewart. When I am tired after a day’s work, I sometimes turn to The Daily Show for entertainment. Carefree, satirical, and irreverent, Stewart never fails to entertain. I prefer him over Keith Obermann, who is too much in your face.

The Republicans have already begun to jockey for position for 2012. Progressives need to gear up soon.

Hello Watson

2011-02-18T22:15:00.004-05:00

In January 1998 I wrote an article entitled, “What If God’s Name Is 01100100?” I was trying to imagine what God would look like in a digital age. What kind of metaphors would we use to describe God? I asked, Would we talk about God’s omnipotence in terms of gigabytes?

Oh boy, gigabytes? How much have I underestimated the power of God!

This week, IBM’s supercomputer Watson beat Jeopardy’s record holder Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a two-match contest. In conceding defeat, Jennings wrote, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”

Watson was created by a team of 25 IBM scientists over four years. It has 10 racks of IBM’s new parallel POWER7 processors, with a capacity equivalent to 6,000 high-end home computers.

One of the answer in Jeopardy was “Kathleen Kenyon’s excavation of this city mentioned in Joshua showed that the walls had been repaired 17 times.”

Watson correctly asked the question, “What is Jericho?” (The whole Bible has been installed in Watson).

Since the computer Deep Blue we have never been so enthralled by the competition between human beings and machine. In the famous contest in May 1997, Deep Blue beat the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

While Deep Blue could anticipate millions of positions of the chess game in seconds, Watson’s ability to understand human language represents a gigantic step forward in artificial intelligence. Paul McDougall writes, “Watson simultaneously runs natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning algorithms to fathom the intent of questions and yield what it thinks is the best answer—all in a matter of seconds or less.”

What are the implications for advances in artificial intelligence for theology?

In her book In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit, Noreen L. Hersfeld writes, “The potentiality of the computer to mimic human thought has opened the door for a new era of self-imaging.”

The abilities of Watson to recognize human language and process complex thought raise the question of what is truly human. What do we see as important in human nature that we want to create robots and cyborgs that can function like us and hope to image in artificial intelligence? How would this tell us about our relationship to other humans and to machines?

In a wider context, what will be the contributions of cognitive sciences to theology? In Minding God: Theology and the Cognitive Sciences, Gregory R. Peterson asks, “What does the Silicon Valley have to do with Jerusalem?” He says that theology has not entered into much dialogue with cognitive sciences. But since cognitive sciences have revolutionized the ways we think about the mind, human nature, and our position in the world, they have much to offer to theology.

More religion scholars have shown interest in the cognitive sciences. At last year's annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, the theme of the plenary sessions was on Religion and Science, with particular attention to new research on the brain/mind.

Watson’s brilliant performance this week will heighten interest in the relation between cognitive sciences and religious studies.

Do the Postcolonial Theorists Write Badly?

2011-02-17T19:30:00.009-05:00

The Journal of Philosophy and Literature used to run Bad Writing Contest in the late 1990s. Postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha won a second prize in 1999 for a passage in The Location of Culture.

"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories,
superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'mormalize' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."

The debate on whether bad writing is necessary has a long history. Socrates was mocked for his technical language. In our modern time, George Orwell in “Politics and the English Language” (1946) warned of the use of obfuscating abstraction in political prose. For him, to write and to think “clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”

The late Edward W. Said shared Orwell’s thinking and criticized the opaque and difficult writings in humanities. Such style of writing, he surmised, has made humanities largely irrelevant to the public. He said intellectuals should communicate as immediately and forcefully as possible.

However, Said defended his friend Bhabha in an interview, saying, “Writers like Bhabha are looking for the occasion to work out ideas. There's something unfinished about it.”

The work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is also notoriously difficult. In his review of Spivak’s work, Terry Eagleton teases that there must be a rule in the handbook for postcolonial critic that reads: “Be as obscurantist as you can decently get away with.”

In 2007 Spivak spent a whole day in conversation with theologians and biblical critics. The result was the anthology Planetary Love: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology. I had the opportunity to ask her if she were to do it all over again, what would she have changed?

Spivak said that she would write in a more accessible way.

This is quite different from her earlier position, for she distrusts the demands for linguistic transparency. The criticism that her work is difficult to understand might mean to her that the person has not worked hard enough.

For Bhabha and Spivak, language is a performance. Bhabha said, “South Asian and Continental traditions tend to be more metaphoric and symbolic in their use of language.”

Bhabha’s mind is subtle, fluid, and multi-dimensional. This might have something to do with his upbringing in highly pluralistic Bombay. His new preface for the Routledge Classic Edition of The Location of Culture said he grew up “in Bombay as a middle-class Parsi—a member of a small Zoroastrian-Persian minority in a predominantly Hindu and Muslim context." He observes, “Learning to work with the contradictory strains of languages lived, and languages learned, has the potential for a remarkable critical and creative impulse.”

Bhabha’s writing reflects the palimpsest of his postcolonial mind and identity.

Spivak writes as she speaks—going back and forth and with loose structures. She demonstrates a mind in transition—transversing different terrains, going at full speed, making sudden turns, and shifting gears.

I certainly hope that Bhabha and Spivak would write in a way that can be more easily understood. I am not always sure that I fully understand what they try to say.

But I am amazed by how their minds work.

The Dalai Lama Met Thomas Merton

2011-02-16T18:55:00.008-05:00

The Dalai Lama met the Trappist monk Thomas Merton at his exiled home at Dharamsala in India in November of 1968. The Dalai Lama was 33 and Merton was 20 years his senior.

The two men had a sense of humor when they met. The Dalai Lama wondered why the Western monk was wearing a pair of tall brownish boots, which seemed out of place in India. He noticed the white robe and a broad leather belt Merton wore. The Dalai Lama was wearing his maroon robes with a patch of golden yellow on his vest.

“Merton was a robust man, both in the physical sense—he had a bodily frame with big bones—and in the spiritual sense,” recalled the Dalai Lama some 40 years after the encounter.

Merton was so curious of the Dalai Lama’s abode and study. He noted the Tibetan block-print texts in oblong sheets, the rows of little bowls of water, a tanka, and marigolds growing in old tin cans. The artificial flowers in a Coke bottle amused him.

Merton was on his trip to Bangkok to meet with abbots of Catholic monastic orders and to attend an interfaith meeting. He took the opportunity to visit India and met with the Dalai Lama for three times at Dharamsala in India, where the Dalai Lama was in exile since 1959.

Merton wrote in his journal: “The Dalai Lama is most impressive as a person. He is strong and alert, bigger than I expected (for some reason I thought he would be small). A very solid, energetic, generous, and warm person, very capable of trying to handle enormous problems.”

I had similar impressions about the Dalai Lama, when I saw him in 1991, when he and his Tibetan monks came to speak in New York for the International Year of Tibet. I still have the seeds the Dalai Lama gave out at the end to remind us to take care of the earth and build a new world.

The Dalai Lama and Merton discovered they had many things in common. Merton’s day began at 2.30 a.m., while the Dalai Lama’s begins at 3.30 a.m. Both spent many hours in the morning in contemplative prayer and silence.

Merton recalled that the Dalai Lama was very interested in Western monasticism and asked about the Cistercian life. He asked Merton about the meaning of the monk’s vows. Merton found out that the Tibetan monks around the Dalai Lama complained as the Cistercian monks did—that they had too much work to do and too little time for meditation.

No one would expect that Merton would die just weeks after the visit of an accidental electric shock in Thailand. The Dalai Lama mourned his death, saying, “the world lost a truly spiritual man…I lost a friend.”

I was very moved by the accounts these two spiritual leaders wrote about their encounter. I tried to imagine the emotions that the Dalai Lama had when he stood inside Merton’s cell in Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky some 20 years after their brief encounter.

The Dalai Lama recalls Merton’s visit in the beginning of his book Toward a True Kinship of Faiths. He urges us to leave our comfort zone and be open to the spiritual treasures of humankind. The journey will deepen our own spiritual practices. He writes, “Thomas Merton opened my eyes to the richness and depth of the Christian faith.”

Architecture of the Mind

2011-02-15T22:34:00.012-05:00

The students in my Spirituality class today responded favorably to my image of the bazaar mind. Bazaar is a marketplace where you go from place to place shopping for what you need. You have no obligation to stay long and no commitment to buy.

Clayton Shirly uses the metaphor of the “bazaar” to describe our networked society. The bazaar mind is constantly connected: surfing on the web, tweeting, chatting on Facebook, while doing homework and/or listening to music at the same time.

A colleague of mine has a blog with hundreds of visitors a day. The sitemeter in her blog shows that her visitors spend on average about one minute on her site.

The bazaar mind is constantly on the go. It is contrary to the cathedral mind, a mind full of knowledge and wisdom. I came across the metaphor of the cathedral mind in Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid.”

The cathedral mind requires years of learning and training. Like a cathedral, the mind is complex, multilayered, and voluminous, with immense depth. Thomas Aquinas is often associated with having such a brilliant mind.

It is very difficult, and totally counter-cultural, in our age to produce people with a cathedral mind. Thomas lived in the Middle Age with much fewer attractions.

What kind of spirituality is suitable for people with a bazaar mind? Should we call these people “the shallows,” as the title of Carr’s book?

As I was thinking about this, I was reminded that the Buddhists have very different images of the mind. The mind that is not trained and wanders around is called the monkey mind. The aim of meditation is to tame the monkey mind, and to become conscious of one’s thoughts. After much practice, the mind can become empty and no longer attached to things.

The most famous story about the empty mind is about Hui Neng, the sixth patriarch of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. The fifth patriarch wanted to select his successor and asked his followers to express their wisdom in a poem. The learned head monk wrote this poem:

The body is the wisdom-tree,
The mind is a bright mirror in a stand;
Take care to wipe it all the time,
And allow no dust to cling.

Hui Neng’s poem was like this:

Fundamentally no wisdom-tree exists,
Nor the stand of a mirror bright.
Since all is empty from the beginning,
Where can the dust alight

Hui Neng received the insignia and became an important master of Chan Buddhism.

I have noticed that many young people in the West are attracted to Zen-like meditation or practices of mindfulness. I once attended a dharma talk by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the Boston Convention Center. Almost 3,000 were present and many were young people. When Thich asked us to meditate, all were quiet.

Perhaps the bazaar mind needs the empty mind for a change.

Why Send Roses

2011-02-14T14:18:00.015-05:00

Today is Valentine's Day and many will send roses to their loved ones. But that is so lack of imagination. Why? A vase of usually the same color of roses looks so monotonous to me. Plus, it is so expensive.

A colleague of mine sent a Powerpoint of Japanese ikebana. Ikekana is the art of flower arrangement, which dated back to the sixth century, when Buddhism was brought to Japan. The Buddhists offer flowers on the altar in honor of the Buddha.

Ikebana embodies the spirit of East Asian aesthetics and beauty. It evokes the balance of the strong and the weak, permanence and impermanence, full and empty.

Ikebana uses not only the flowers, but also the stems and leaves, and draws emphasis toward shape, style, and form. The structure of the flower arrangement often symbolizes heaven, earth, and human beings.

Traditionally, ikebana is placed in an alcove or a corner of the room, usually with a scroll. The flowers are changed according to the seasons. Imagine drinking tea in such a room with your loved ones.

So next year's Valentine's Day, you can

be more creative.

Egyptian Revolution and China

2011-02-13T21:11:00.005-05:00

What happened at Tahrir Square in the past two weeks reminded me of Tiananmen Square in 1989.

After 18 days of peaceful demonstration, the people of Egypt forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign. The exhilarating people at the Tahrir Square chanted, “The people made the regime step down.”

The protesters cleaned the Square to prepare for the birth of a new Egypt. A woman offered white chrysanthemum flowers to the soldiers.

After ruling Egypt with a strong hand for 30 years, Mubarak left Cairo last Friday and handed the control of the country to the military. As the Vice President announced this transition, car horns honked and the people sang their national anthem and waved their flags.

The outcome of the Tiananmen demonstration was drastically different. A lasting image was a young Chinese man standing alone to block a line of tanks from moving closer to Tiananmen.

The Chinese presses were careful and guarded in reporting Egypt’s regime change. It has been reported that China attempted to prevent the dissemination of information of the Egyptian protests over the Internet.

After Mubarak’s resignation, the Chinese government released a statement saying China hopes stability and order would soon be restored in Egypt and urges foreigners not to interfere with Egypt’s internal affairs.

Many Chinese commentators believe that the kind of mass demonstration in Egypt will not happen in China anytime soon.

China and the Arabic world chose very different paths of development in the last several decades, Chinese critic Meng Xuan writes.

In 1952 a military coup d’état by a group of young military officers overthrew the monarchy of King Farouk. Since then Egypt has been under of the rule of strong men—Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak. Egypt experienced two different ideologies in its development: increasing Westernization and capitalist market economy or Islamization under fundamentalist religious groups.

Even though Mubarak had been re-elected, his government was criticized because of economic decline, unemployment, and increased influences of Islamic fundamentalism.

China began its economic reform and liberalization policies since 1980. Deng Xiaoping led China toward a socialist market economy. Today, China is the world’s second largest economy and the country has become much more pluralistic. Young people have many outlets for their energy. Although the gap between the rich and the poor is huge, it would be difficult for people of different sectors to come together to launch a mass protest such as the one in Egypt.

The road to democracy is long and tortuous. The Egyptians have lighted the fire of democracy in Yemen and other countries in the Middle East. I hope Egypt will not soon turn into a military dictatorship and a free presidential election will occur in a timely fashion.

What Is Neurotheology

2011-02-12T20:24:00.005-05:00

We have heard about feminist theology, ecotheology, Black theology, Latino/a theology, liberation theology, and animal theology. The latest one is called neurotheology.

Neurotheology has attracted attention in academia and among the general public. Many books have been published that explore the relationship between brain science and religious experience, and re-open the debate between science and religion.

Dr. Henry Benson of Harvard, a pioneer in mind/body medicine, talked about the relaxation response and the benefits of meditation in the 1970s. Today one can observe what happens in the brain when one meditates.

Scientist Andrew B. Newberg studied the brain activities of experienced Tibetan monks before and during meditation. The brain scans showed increased activities in the meditators’ frontal lobe, which is responsible for focusing and concentration.

Another study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison using functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) showed that compassion could be learned. That parts of the brain associated with compassion could be changed by meditation.

Some scientists insist that our religious and spiritual experiences are nothing more than biological phenomena. Newberg said on NPR, “But the data also does not specifically eliminate the notion that there is a religious or spiritual or divine presence in the world.”

Newberg suggests that science and religion are not antagonistic, and the two can help one another. Georgetown University Professor Ronald Murphy, S.J., writes, “Augustine once defined theology as fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking to understand. Newberg wants to establish a partnership between that quest and mens quaerens intellectum, the brain seeking to understand.”

In Principles of Neurotheology, Newberg discusses the interaction between neuroscience and theology, proposes guidelines for a neurotheological hermeneutic, and reflects on major topics in theology.

You might have also seen Dr. Daniel Amen’s PBS programs on “Change Your Brain, Change Your Life.” He has also written Healing the Hardware of the Soul and talks about optimizing the brain-soul connection.

One chapter particularly catches my eyes. It’s about brain health and the Sunday sermon. He asks, “Can your priest, rabbi, or minister’s weekly sermon be affected by brain function?” Then he answers, “Preachers who exhort the love of God likely have cool limbic systems; ministers who preach God’s wrath likely have limbic systems that are often associated with negativity.”

I guess next time when your church interviews for a new minister, you better ask for his or her brain scans.

Do you like rituals? Dr. Amen writes, Catholics, Lutherans, and Episcopalians tend to be more “anterior cingulate” in brain function. This part of brain enables people to be flexible, adaptable, going with the flow, and cooperative.

Christians “with temporal-lobe sensitivity who experience mystical or spiritual experiences may gravitate to Evangelical of Pentecostal worship services.” The temporal lobe is responsible for memory, hearing, and the understanding of language.

I find this emerging field of neurotheology fascinating. Knowing a bit more about how the brain functions helps us to be better pastors and spiritual leaders.

Top 5 Funniest Theological/Biblical Works

2011-02-11T13:22:00.009-05:00

Theology—God-talk—is often heavy, serious, and pretentious. Often too long-winded (Thomas’ Summa) and dry (Barth’s Church Dogmatics).

Yet occasionally there are some gems that cause a good laugh. Have you read something humorous and witty lately? I’d love to hear them.

Here is my list of top 5 funniest works by theologians and biblical scholars:

1. Stephen D. Moore, “Ugly Thought: On the Face and Physique of the Historical Jesus,” in Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies: The Third Sheffield Colloquium

Moore is a rare biblical scholar who has the skills to write fiction. He pokes fun at the covers of the books on the historical Jesus.

“Many of us have joined that manhunt for the Jew of Nazareth, many more of us cheering or yelling obscenities from the sidelines. Startled eyes turn as the hysterical Jesus suspects are dragged into the church by the triumphant band of scholars. To the dubious congregation in the pews, each Jesus seems more unlikely than the last. 'Did you at any time claim to be the Christ, the Son of the living God?' each is asked in turn. 'I did not,' most of them reply.”

2. Gale A. Yee, “‘Oooooh, Onan!’: Geschlechtsgeschicte and Women in the Biblical World,” in Are We Amused? Humour About Women in the Biblical World

This one is rated PG-13—parents strongly cautioned, lest you have to explain to your child what did Onan do.

To avoid onanism, one conservative pundit instructs:

1. Never touch the intimate parts of your body excerpt during normal toilet processes.
2. Avoid being alone as much as possible.
3. Wear pajamas that are difficult to open, yet loose and not binding.
4. In very severe cases, it may be necessary to tie a hand to the bed frame.

3. Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology

She would surely win the Most Daring Theologian Award, if there were one. For her the greatest sin of a theologian is to be dull.

She creates a whole new vocabulary for theology: the G-spot, French kissing God, Bi/Christ, dis-grace, queer God, and the like. She invites us to lift up the skirt of Jesus and see what is there.

4. Mary Daly, Pure Lust

Arguably the most witty and sharp-tongued feminist philosopher. Her ability to make fun of Christian symbols, doctrines, and the church was legendary.

“Vice [from the Latin vitis, vine], then, can Name the characteristic spiral pattern of biophilic movement, of growth.”

“Thus lust is pure in the sense that it is characterized by unmitigated malevolence. It is pure in the sense that it is ontologically evil.”

5. Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

I know, I know, she is not a theologian. Don’t be a snob. Isn’t she funny?

“looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father—God as borderline personality.”

Now, please help to make the list up to 10, or more.

How to Read a Theological Book

2011-02-10T20:18:00.006-05:00

As theological educators, we want to help students to develop critical theological thinking. Let me offer some hints on how to read a theological book:

· When you read a theology book, instead of nodding, shake your head. Don’t give consent to the author too easily.

· Don’t assume the author has you in mind. Then you will see Anselm, Calvin, or Tillich were writing for a different audience and context.

· Try to see the forest and not just the trees. Let me teach you some Chinese and you'll get it. Forest looks like 森, and a tree is 木.

· A picture is worth 1,000 words. Some people will benefit from something like a concept map.

· After reading, put down the book, summarize the main arguments in your own words. If you can’t do this, that means you haven’t grasped it yet. Re-read.

· Ask who is missing from the conversation? While you can’t expect the author to speak for the poor, the blind, your next-door neighbor, the girl with a tattoo, and everyone else, you want to ask what are the voices missing.

· Set up a debate with a friend or in your own head, e.g. I asked the students to debate whether Christ is Black when reading James Cone.

· If you don’t understand, take a break. Your mind might be constipated. Poke somebody on Facebook, tweet, and have coffee.

· Laugh Out Loud. This is a strategy taught by Mary Daly. Ask many early feminists. This was how they survived seminary.

· Create your own index. The indexer of the book might not have your interest in mind. Note down the concepts important to you and page numbers.

· Buy the book. This is not to fatten the publishing houses. Having the book means you can underline, draw droodles, and stick colored tapes on it.

· Stretch the ideas to the limit. This one is from Gayatri Spivak. This is how she can be a feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist at the same time.

· Plot a different itinerary. Also from Spivak. Trace the itinerary of the author’s thought and plot a different one.

· Invite yourself to the table. What would you say to the author if you meet her? What are the questions you want to ask?

Crazy Busy and the Rule of Life

2011-02-09T14:59:00.004-05:00

I often wonder how can one manage all the emails, blogs, speaking engagements, appointments, relationships in this crazy, busy world. I feel over-booked, over-stretched all the time.

In my spirituality class, we talked about the rule of life. The Latin term for “rule” is regula, from which our words regular and regulate derive. Marjorie Thompson explains that this does not mean to be restrictive. “It is meant to establish a rhythm of daily living, a basic order within which new freedom can grow.”

Many of us Anglicans do not know there is an Anglican rule of life. Owen Thomas says that the Anglican rule has 5 elements:
• Weekly public worship
• Daily private or family prayer
• Participation in the mission of the church
• Spiritual reading
• Self-examination in preparation for the Eucharist*

The most famous rule is perhaps the rule of St. Benedictine, written in the 6th century. Sister Jane Michele McClure, OSB, says, “Benedict envisioned a balanced life of prayer and work as the ideal. Monastics would spend time in prayer so as to discover why they're working, and would spend time in work so that good order and harmony would prevail in the monastery.”

There has been a revival of interest in contemplation and the wisdom of monastic life. When our lives are so chaotic and fragmented, we long for some structure and order.

Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating ADD, has coined a new term ADT (attention deficit trait) to describe symptoms caused by living in a hyper-kinetic environment.

Our brains are required to process data faster and faster, to adapt to new situations quickly, and to solve problems flexibly. In a survival mode, we become easily exhausted, anxious, impulsive, and are about to snap.

Hallowell can’t prescribe a regula, but he can at least suggest some remedies. I have selected those things that are most helpful to me:

• Get enough sleep
• Exercise at least 30 minutes at least every other day
• Talk to people, not just sending emails and texting
• Set aside email until you have done at least one or two important tasks
• Don’t let papers accumulate (I have never learned how)
• Pay attention to the time of the day that you are at your best and do important work
• Clear one corner of your desk/office so that you can work comfortably
• Do an easy rote task when you feel overwhelmed.

Owen C. Thomas, Christian Life and Practice (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), 8-9.

Is HuffPost Selling Out?

2011-02-08T19:41:00.004-05:00

I was shocked yesterday to hear that Arianna Huffington has sold the Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million.

The HuffPost was founded by Huffington and Kenny Lerer in May 2005. Beginning with a shoestring budget, Arianna will pocket about $100 million from the deal.

Arianna wrote that she became addicted to the blogosphere in 2002, on the heels of the Trent Lott/Thurmond story. She noted that blogging has rapidly transformed the media culture in America. Citizens are empowered to create news, and they are no longer passive consumers.

With 25 million visitors each month, the HuffPost is one of the first Internet newspapers to fully integrate with social networks, such as FaceBook and Twitter.

I am a frequent visitor to the HuffPost because it started out as a progressive blog. The site features many left-wing commentators, critical of President Bush's policies. Many academics also write for HuffPost, providing information and detailed analyses of current issues. My colleague Patrick S. Cheng is a regular blogger for the Religion page.

But over time, I have noticed that the HuffPost has branched out to cover more topics: health, divorce, books, arts, education, sports, etc. As Arianna said yesterday, only 15 percent of her site's traffic is for politics (that is down from 50 percent a couple of years ago). Politics is just one of the two dozen sections.

Indeed, the site is more interesting than something like Politico. I read the blogs "The First Lady's Dress," and "What Makes a Man Attractive" in the last two days because the latter includes a gorgeous photo of George Clooney.

The site has become a hot commodity because it has created a community. But has it been sold to corporate interests? Will it lose its progressive edge in order to have a broader appeal? I have noticed many popular posts on the sidebar featuring scantily-clothed stars.

Many people are deeply concerned about the deal. Arianna's blog announcing the deal has 221,000 pageviews and more than 7,400 comments.

Many progressives want to see news media that would counter-balance the conservative talk shows and FOX News. It is too early to tell if the visitors will go somewhere else.

Many have criticized the site for not paying its writers. Now that Arianna has cut such a shrewd deal, will her bloggers continue to write without pay?

Arianna, at 60, has reinvented herself so many times. Some one said, she is "the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus," while others admire her ability to always chasing the next big thing.

It is amazing to see her ability to use so many platforms to get her message out. Arianna is a phenomenon that is worth paying attention to.

Can a Feminist Love Football?

2011-02-07T08:08:00.008-05:00

Can a feminist love baseball? No question. There are no head-butting and no bone-chilling tackles.

And if you live in Boston, you are expected to be a card-carrying member of the Red Sox Nation.

American football is a different matter.

I didn't grow up with American football, but with English soccer. My dad's only hobby was to follow his favorite soccer teams on the sports pages and on the radio. Pele and Maradona were household names.

So when I first watched American football, I was surprised to find that only the kicker can kick the ball. Everyone else holds the ball in his hands.

English soccer is a world game. More than 700 million people watched the World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands last summer. One cannot but marvel at the cultural influences of the British Empire.

Football is so quintessentially American. "It is big, optimistic, lousy, passionate, and egoistic," a Chinese commentator says. It is a war game: violence masquerading as entertainment. It cost $3 million for a 30-second ad last night.

The first football game I watched was Super Bowl XXXI in 1997. It was completely out of curiosity. Beantown was exhilarated because the Patriots were going against Green Bay Packers in the final. Buses had signs that read "Go Pats." Star Market even had a display of the two teams made of fish fillet. Tuna's (Bill Parcell) team, the Patriots, were made of tuna.

It was clear that the Super Bowl was a cultural phenomenon and not just a ball game. It turned out to be the most exceptional final game. Green Bay's kick returner Desmond Howard won the game's MVP for scoring the winning touchdown on a Super Bowl record of 99-yard kick off return.

When the Patriots became a dominant team in the last decade, I was hooked. I love watching football because it is all about teamwork. You need skinny and fast receivers such as Randy Moss, as well as big and strong linebackers such as Mike Vrabel. A quarterback as talented as Tom Brady needs the protection of his linebackers.

Sports is one of the few places that men are allowed to show their emotions. KG and Michael Jordan play with a lot of passion. But it is nothing like when Aaron Rodgers bumped and touched the head of Greg Jennings when the two connected for a touch down.

My husband said football is just a lot of big men piling over a ball. Well, it is a little more than that. After I have watched TV programs that dissected a football game, I know it involves a lot of game planning, strategies, and tactics. You can go back to the tapes to see who was not doing the right thing.

Football is the most unpredictable game. One can throw a "Hail Mary" at the end, like Doug Flutie's game-winning 48-yard pass that gave the Eagles a victory.

Last night, the game was not decided until the last minute. Big Ben and the Steelers got to work with two minutes left. They were down 6 points. They had been there before and had scored. But Big Ben came up short this time; his 4th down couldn't connect. Then all was over. The Packers almost couldn't believe their luck.

There was also so much drama behind the games. Aaron Rodgers was one of the most scrutinized quarterbacks because he had succeeded the legendary Brett Favre. Commentators prefered him over Ben Roethlisberger, whose conduct off the court has courted a lot of ire. He was accused of sexual assault by a young woman. Since I had no connections with either teams, I rooted for Rodgers' team.

During the orientation of my school, I told the new students that I am a feminist and I belong to the Patriots Nation. Sometimes we should just follow our passions. Brady was voted unanimously as the League's 2010 MVP and Bill Belichick NFL Coach of the Year. We have hopes for 2011.

Theology in a Post-Theological Moment

2011-02-06T12:29:00.005-05:00

"What is the fate of theology in a post-theological moment?"* asked Dr. Corey D. B. Walker, a professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at Brown University.

"A post-theological moment?" One might ask when, and perhaps why?

Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are talking openly about God. The TV evangelists have not shut up. Even atheists, such as Christopher Hutchins and company, are busy talking about God --though negatively.

It it way too early to speak of a post-theological moment?

Walker, of course, does not mean that there is no theology done. He is saying that the way we used to do theology needs to change, and change fast and radically.

So what are the problems as Walker sees them?

First, there have been much intellectual stimulation and discussions on the theological and the political that the traditional boundaries of the theological can no longer contain the depth and breadth of the discourse.

Second, there is the crisis of thought, in that the ways we understand theology cannot be contained within the traditional theological proper.

Walker's arguments touch on the more fundamental questions of "What is theology?" and "Who is defining it?"

When Asians and/or feminists do theology, our works have been seen as "less than," or "not quite" theology. The implicit norm is still white male theology.

But Walker's "post-theological moment" connotes an ethical inquiry: Why is theology seemingly impotent to address the present? He is particularly interested in the conjuncture between the theological and the political.

As Mark Lewis Taylor comments in his recent book The Theological and the Political:

"This moment has often been discussed at the resurgence of a particular kind of "theologico-political," viewing Theology, with its diverse beliefs and practices of its faith as rife with political meanings and consequences for wide sectors of secular and public life, even for purportedly nontheological and nonreligious sectors."

Taylor has written a very important book and the subtitle of it is "On the Weight of the World."

The author of The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, Taylor has been involved in prison reform for decades. In this new work, he presents an analysis of the politicality of theology, which persists as "the theological."

The book is divided into five chapters. It engages critical political theorists as well as the art of Richard Wright, of Guantanamo's detainees, and other torture survivors.

It also develops Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of "transimmanence" to gesture beyond transcendence and immanence, and to open spaces for a "creative world-projecting and world-making power."

For this, theology must open itself to artful imaging: whether in music, painting, poetry, sculpture, and cyberart.

The book may be difficult for those unfamiliar with Nancy, Bourdieu, Agamben, Butler, and JanMohamed. But it will be very rewarding for all those searching for new ways to re-energize the theological discourse and to speak to the "post-theological moment."

My mind has been stretched. But more importantly, I was deeply moved by Taylor's concerns for the tortured, the colonized, and the war victims, who have too often been left out in our imaging of God.

*Corey D. B. Walker," Theology and Democratic Futures," Political Theology, 10, no. 1 (April 2009): 200.

Blogging to Change the World

2011-02-05T16:15:00.007-05:00

"All writing is designed to change the world, at least a small part of the world, or in some small ways perhaps a change in the reader's mood or his appreciation of a certain kind of beauty," writes Mary Pipher in Writing to Change the World.

With blogging, everyone can write to change the world. At least, try to. You don't need a publisher or an editor. It is instant and spontaneous.

If you've found a fabulous and cheap Indian restaurant in downtown, you can blog about it. If you've read something interesting, you can tell your friends through your blog.

But writing a blog is not for everyone.

Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor of The Atlantic, wrote "Why I blog." He says, "For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal."

Blogging can be hard for academics. Why? Blogging requires thinking on the fly. We are used to take time to collect our thoughts, gather the data, and wait until events have settled. But by then, our blog will be so outdated. All that needs to be said would have been blogged already.

Blogging requires a different writing style. I am not used to writing paragraphs that are so short. I was horrified when the editor of a communal blog cut one of my paragraphs down to only one sentence.

As academics we are used to put our most important conclusion at the end, after we have laid out the arguments. But in a blog, we need to put the most important thing upfront, for we have a few seconds--three or less--to encourage people to read more. There is eye-tracking technology that follows a reader's eye movement as the person views a page.

The Yahoo! Style Guide says most readers scan first:

They scan to see whether the content is relevant.

They are more likely to scan the top of the page than the bottom.

They look at headings, boldfaced terms, and images.

Thus the Style Guide advises:

Keep it short: use short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, bulleted lists.

Front-load your content: put the most important content in the upper-left area of the screen.

Keep it simple: include only one or two ideas per short paragraph, choose common words over more difficult ones.

The Huffington Post is a site I visit often. Some of the site's bloggers are real experts in this genre. I especially like Bill Maher, who is always witty and funny. Here is how he writes about the NFL and socialism.

The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging recommends the following rules:

Blog often

Perfect is the enemy of done.

Write like you speak

Focus on specific details

Own your topic: think of your topic as you beat

Know your audience

Write short: we live in an ADD culture

Become part of the conversation with like-minded blogs

I especially like "perfect is the enemy of done."

When I started, I did not know how to cut and paste from a Word doc and did not know there is a devise for checking spelling in Blogger. Now I have learned gradually. I even know how to post a video. This is a video on how to create a blog with Blogger. May be you should start one too.

What Do the Chinese Think?

2011-02-04T16:58:00.009-05:00

What do the Chinese think during the so-called "peaceful rise of China?"

Today's Chinese newspaper The World Journal interviewed two intellectuals in China and asked them to recommend books for understanding contemporary China. One of these books is a translated work and the others are written by Chinese authors.

Professor Zhang Yiwu (张颐武), a professor of Chinese Language at Beijing University and Deputy Director of the Research Institute of Cultural Resources, recommends Martin Jacques's When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. This book is so popular that it has a mainland Chinese translation (left) and a Taiwanese translation (right).

Martin Jacques argues that China is learning from the West. But because China does not follow completely the West, she develops her own model.

Professor Zhang also recommends Zhang Wuchang's Chinese Economic Institution, which details economic changes in the last 32 years, since open policy was adopted. Another book uses the Buddhist six reincarnations to describe the changes of mentality of Chinese people since the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Professor Li Zhengliang (李政亮), a professor of communications at Tianjin Nankai University, recommends several books that touch on popular culture. One discusses cultural workers who have migrated to Beijing and created an alternative cultural space. They are anarchists and rebel against the dominant ideology.

The Tribe of Ants explores the existence of young university graduates who are unemployed. Since 2007, it has become more difficult for graduates to find jobs in big cities. Those who grew up in rural areas would lose face if they return to the countryside.

Several books talk about the situation of Chinese intellectuals. Prosperous China 2013 criticizes that as China becomes more powerful, the intellectuals have lost their power of critical thinking. Wither China discusses intellectuals' concerns and mentality.

Professor Li hopes that as China has introduced market economy, people in Taiwan will get to know more about the intellectual and cultural scenes of China through dialogue and exchanges.

Chinese New Year

2011-02-03T10:51:00.027-05:00

Today is Chinese New Year, the beginning of the Year of the Rabbit. My sister in Hong Kong sent me a greeting card, showing the plum branches they bought for the new year. The Chinese characters say, "May your wishes come true and may you have luck and harmony."

As a Christian, I celebrate three different new year days. The Christian calendar begins with the season of Advent. I spent the first week of Advent last year in Victoria, British Columbia, and preached at Christ Church Cathedral. We began the new year preparing for the birth of Christ.

The New Year of the Gregorian calendar begins on January 1. This is the day of circumcision of Jesus (the eighth day of his birth) and the baby was given the name Jesus.

The Chinese New Year was a big day for my family when we lived in Hong Kong. My sisters and brothers all returned home on New Year's Eve for the big banquet. It was a time for family reunion. The Chinese New Year is about family, relationships, and food.

New year is a time of renewal and fresh start. In many ancient religious traditions, there is the myth of eternal return.

There is a group of psalms called enthronement psalms, such as Ps 47, 93, and 96. These psalms emphasize Yahweh as the king.

Clap your hands, all you peoples;

shout to God with loud songs of joy.

For the Lord, the Most High, is awesome,

a great king over all the earth. (Ps 47: 1-2)

Some have suggested that these psalms were likely used during Israel's New Year's Festival, which celebrated Yahweh's kingship and rule and God's covenant with Israel. The all-powerful God is king of the universe.

The belief that God rules over the universe is under much attack today. Stephen Hawking has said, "Let there be no God!," and there was light! He also proudly proclaimed, "Science makes God unnecessary."

Yet his Cambridge colleague Stephen Toulmin reminds us that traditional world picture combined "an astronomical, a teleological, and a theological picture" and stressed "cosmic interrelatedness."

Toulmin's teacher Ludwig Wittgenstein, said in Culture and Value, "An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it."

Indeed, "the opposite of faith is not doubt, it's certainty," writes Anne Lamott.

Poetry and the In-between Space

2011-02-02T08:29:00.013-05:00

What happens when theologians meet with poets? Several faculty of the Boston Theological Institute found this a very rewarding experience. Professor Mark S. Burrows of the Andover Newton Theological School was the instigator of the group.

The first poet we met was Robert Cording, author of Walking with Ruskin and a professor of English and Creative Writing at the College of Holy Cross.

Just now,

overlapping,

the sound of water

against rock, against rock

and, diminuendo

with less plock, against driftwood. . .

I instantly connect with his poetry--so Haiku-like, so Chinese.

The images jump from the pages. His words so sparse.

As an epigraph to one poem, he cites Wang Wei. It was Wang Wei , an eighth-century Chinese poet, who famously said that there is painting in poetry, and poetry in painting.

Poetry has a special place in Chinese culture. The Chinese word for poetry shi means "the language of the heart." No private or social occasion was considered complete in the old days without a few chosen words in rhyme to mark it.

Unlike in the West, Chinese women have had a long tradition of writing poetry. Many of these have been preserved and published. The most famous one is Li Qingzhao of the Song Dynasty.

The ground is covered with yellow flowers

Faded and fallen in showers

Who will pick them up now?

Sitting alone at the window, how

Could I but quicken

As the language of the heart, poetry allows the Chinese to express the subtleties of realities and the shades of emotions. The best poetry infuses the scenery with emotions.

Poetry inverts grammar, reverses syntax, and separates lines in awkward places. We don't call this "poetic licence" for nothing. As a result, poetry is often hard to understand.

But for Cording, poetry opens an in-between space, and in-betweenness is the condition of our humanness. "We live between our birth and death, about which we can know almost nothing," he writes.

In a traditional Tang poem of 4 lines and each with only 5 characters, you cannot say much. But much can be said. A whole universe can be painted. What is not said is often as important as what is said.

It is between the lines, in the in-between spaces, that the readers are invited to re-create with the poet, to imagine, and to roam freely.

Preparing for Chinese New Year

2011-02-01T07:30:00.007-05:00

The Chinese New Year will be this Thursday. People who are far away from home will return home for the holiday. They will prepare special foods and give children pocket money and new clothes.

The preparations for the New year can teach us a few spiritual lessons.

You have to clean the house, especially the kitchen, which can be full of greasy smell because of the stir-fly. If you don't do so, the Kitchen God will give you a bad report. Periodical cleaning is great for your spiritual health too.

I will give out the Chinese word fu for "blessing" on red paper to the students in my spirituality class. I will ask them to clean out a corner of their room and put the word "blessing" there, and create an altar or a space for meditation.

The Chinese like to buy flowers for the New Year. Before his death, my father used to buy narcissus bulbs and cut them at a certain date so that they would blossom during the New Year. He would give each of his children who were no longer living at home narcissus bulbs for the holidays.

The New Year is the beginning of spring. It is fitting to welcome spring in our lives with flowers. Some of the favorite flowers for the Chinese include peony, chrysanthemum, lily. They also like blooming plum and quince branches.

Family and friends gather for a sumptuous meal on New Year's eve. The people in China have a long holiday for the New Year and traffic will be very congested. Those migrant workers will try their best to return home, as the New Year is the most important time to see the families.

To mark the auspicious New Year day, my mother would only eat vegetarian food on that day. She would offer thanksgiving to the ancestors and pray for the coming year.

Since I have moved to the U.S., I do not keep up with the tradition. But this year when I visited my sister in New York several weeks ago, she helped me to select some narcissus bulbs. They are blooming in the kitchen and giving out tiny white and yellow flowers.

My EDS colleagues gave me a large bouquet of flowers at the party yesterday in honor of me for receiving the honorary degree. I was very thankful for their kind gesture. So now I have enough flowers to fill three vases. My daughter is working and can't come home. All I need to do is cleaning up the kitchen and I am all set for the New Year.

Postcolonial Spirituality?

2011-01-31T09:17:00.026-05:00

I am teaching a course on Spirituality of Contemporary World in the spring semester. I have 16 students in my class and we will be reading Christian authors (e.g. Sandra Schneiders, Marjorie Thompson, Owen Thomas, Michael Battle) as well as the Dalai Lama's Toward a True Kinship of Faiths and Thich Nhat Hanh's Teachings on Love.

We are very fortunate to have a colleague Katherine Stiles, who had an audience with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in northern India in January. She is going to share with us her exciting pilgrimage with the EDS community later in the spring.

I have long admired the work of Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and have introduced him to my students. I visited his Plum Village near Bordeaux in southwest France some years ago and had a most tranquil and transforming experience.

Postcolonial spirituality must be interfaith, fluid, hybrid, and not be boxed.

This I know. What I am less sure is how traditional Christian practices fit into the picture.

For example how can you go back to the pre-critical stage of reading the Bible "spiritually"? The Christian tradition has the venerable tradition of Lectio Divina, which has been practiced for centuries. The four basic phases of this spiritual reading consist of lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio. You can read more about this in Thompson's Soul Feast.

This method of reading is meant to inculcate submission to the authority of Scripture as the Word of God. But this can be "dangerous to your health" both physically and spiritually, if you were a woman and a postcolonial.

How can communal worship be a source of spiritual sustenance when Rite Two of the Book of Common Prayer (the most often used rite for Eucharist in the Episcopal churches) is full of androcentric language? Even though the priest can inclusivize it, your mind is still constantly distracted.

What about the hymns we sing--still so full of Christian triumphant images, and sometimes very militaristic.

As this semester progresses, I would like to reflect more deeply on how we can reclaim and reconstruct the Christian spiritual practices, so that they are no longer relics of the past, but joyful guides for Christian living.

I wrote this poem in 1992 when I attended the Third Assembly of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians in Nairobi. I asked the theologians present images that had come up for them during the conference and built a poem around them. Together we read this during our first spirituality class.

We see the Spirit in the ancient gong

Calling us to silence, to listen

The embryonic rhythm of life

Vibrating, resounding, all-embracing

We see the Spirit in the water

Cleansing our body, healing our soul

We drink from the same cup

Renewing, sustaining, replenishing

We see the Spirit in the fire

Errupting with passion, like a volcano

Our anger against injustice

Burning, glowing, fast-spreading

We see the Spirit in the circle

Learning Miriam's dance, taking first steps

In solidarity with all women

Dancing, chanting, spiraling

We see the Spirit in the colors

Taking pride in our culture, our rites

Black, yellow, brown, and white

Celebrating, living, rejoicing

We see the Spirit in our bonding

Confessing our brokenness, our division

Hope we offer to each other

Visioning, struggling, empowering

Swedish Mission and China

2011-01-30T04:10:00.006-05:00

On Tao Fong Shan, Hong Kong, is a beautiful Chinese Christian center and chapel. The work has been supported by Swedish and Norwegian missons.

I knew very little of the Swedish mission and have never heard of Eric Folke (1862-1939).

There is an article on Folke in the Swedish Missological Themes in 2010 written by a Norwegian scholar Ole Bjorn Rongen.

Folke came to China in 1887 after the abortive earlier missionary efforts in the 1840s and 1850s. He stayed in China till 1904 and worked to establish mission stations in Shanxi, Shaaxi, and Henan, poor provinces in the heart of China. After his return to Sweden, he occupied leadership positions in the Swedish Mission Council.

Just as the English James Legge (1815-1897) and the German Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930), Folke became missionary-cum-Sinologist. He translated Daodejing, Zhuangzi, and excerpts of Confucian classics into Swedish. He was the first one to have done so.

Unfortunately Folke's work as a sinologist was soon forgotten, as he was overshadowed by the Norwegian Karl Ludvig Reichelt (1877-1952), whose books became better known because they were translated into English. Reichelt also founded the Christian Mission to the Buddhists first in China and then moved to Hong Kong. When Reichelt died, he was buried at the Tao Fong Shan cemetry.

I must spend more time to understand this history better.

Swedish Church and Society

2011-01-29T14:52:00.008-05:00

I went to the baptism of Ingrid, the six-month girl of a friend of Dr. Ann-Cathrin Jarl and Rev. Cia Wadstein, this morning at St. Mark's Church in Stockholm. Ingrid was conceived by artificial insemination for her parents are a lesbian couple.

I have not been to a baptism of the Church of Sweden and when Cia said that she would be the celebrant I was glad to go along.

The church outside is very plain looking, but the inside is quite beautiful, in typical simple, artistic northern-European style. The pews are made of very fine carpentry and the kneeling stools are covered by wool. The altar is very simple, with a cross, candles, and vases with flowers.

I was surprised that each child has her/his own baptism ceremony, surrounded by relatives, friends, and loved ones. In the U.S. baptism is usually done in a group. The Church of Sweden has confirmation when the child grows up, similar to that of the Anglican Church.

The Church of Sweden is one of the progressive churches in Europe. In 1958 the Church approved the ordination of women and women were first ordained in 1960. Gay men and lesbians then demanded to be fully accepted in the church and sexual orientation has not become an issue for ordination.

When Bishop Eva Brunne was consecrated as the Bishop of Stockholm in 2009, her lesbian identity attracted much international attention. But it was not an issue in the Swedish church.

Sweden allowed for civic partnership of gay men and lesbians in the mid-1990s. When the constitution was changed to allow same-sex marriage in 2008, the church synod approved same-sex marriage to take place in churches in the same year.

After the baptism, Ann-Cathrin and Cia took me to see the old town of Stockholm. We passed by the Cathedral and I fondly remembered that my former dean at Harvard Divinity School Krister Stendahl was the Bishop of Stockholm from 1984-88. He had written a book on Paul's view on women in the 1950s and made a strong case for the equality of women and men.

Sweden is a democratic socialist country and the state provides a lot of services. Education is free and health care is very affordable. You need to pay a co-pay of $20 when you visit the doctor or check in the hospital, but after you have paid $150 for the year, everything is free!

Emma has multiple sclerosis and wanted to come to Ingrid's baptism. She has a personal assistant 7/24 provided by the government. The government also paid for her taxi to come from northern Uppsala to Stockholm, some 40 mins away.

Ingrid's birth-mother has a one-year maternity leave with paid, and the other mother has several months off. Educated and working mothers can thus afford to have 2-3 children.

Sweden has central heating for the city, and garbage is burnt to generate power. It has also a very good recycling system: food for compost, paper and plastic, and bottles.

I am very impressed by the ways the Swedes take care of the sick, old, and marginalized. It this a better society because people think more of the common good?

President Obama has been criticized as a "socialist" and for wanting to change USA into "Europe." Well, the system in Sweden is not bad, and Obama is far from being a socialist.

I asked my hosts why the Swedes have chosen for such a social order. Ann-Cathrin said the Swedes were literate for several hundred years. One had to learn to read the catechism in order to be baptized. Lutheran teachings also inform social morality and influence the social order.

For my Swedish friends, Americans hardly read newspapers and they are not educated by TV programs, which are full of advertisements. Ann-Cathrin called the Tea Party movement a stupidity movement.

Healthcare accounts for about 10% of the Swedish GNP, and the percentage in USA is much higher. Isn't it stupid not to have a public option? Why are Americans supporting the Tea Party, which wants to stop Obamacare. Is it really because of stupidity, I wonder.

A Gold Ring and a Top Hat

2011-01-28T18:26:00.012-05:00

I received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University this afternoon. I was given a gold ring (with seven crosses). It symbolizes faithfulness toward science and scholarship.

At first I wasn't sure it would be real gold. At Harvard you can order a class ring from the Coop. Needless to say, these class rings are not real gold.

At Uppsala you have to order it from one of the top jewellers in town. It is custom-made and comes in a black elegant leather box.

Yesterday, when I got it from the jeweller, it was a bit small. I had given them size 4.5 American. The jeweller said it might be because my finger had swollen because of the long flight. Today it fits.

It was the top hat that totally fascinated me.

The Doctor of Theology was meant for men. I was told that they got a hat, a sword, and a gold ring in ancient days.

I had to find a hatter in Boston to have my head measured. I could not easily find one. So I went to Macy's and a hat shop in Boston near the Boston Common. Their hats have sizes small, medium, and large, so it was not very helpful.

The last hatter in Boston Arthur Stephens died in 1990. No one could tell me how to find someone with a conformateur to measure my head. When I saw this conformateur in Google, I realized how uncultured Boston men have become after poor Arthur died.

The conformateur measures the shape and the size of head, since the head is not exactly round.

The hat symbolizes freedom and power. Only the faculties of Theology, Law, Medicine, and Pharmacy give out a hat, the other faculties give out a laurel-crown. I was glad that I got a hat, since the laurel will not last. They are made of real leaves.

The ceremony lasted about two and a half hour. It included a lecture, the conferrment of doctorates, and music. The canon outside the building saluted each of the honorary doctorates. The ceremony was very formal, and only the Finns and the Swedes still keep the tradition.

We had to bow to the Vice-Chancellor and other dignitories after we received our diploma. The trick was to keep the hat on the head when you did so. Instead of bowing, I did a curtsy.

In the evening we had a festive banquet in a castle, where the king in the fifteenth cenury entertained his guests. It was almost 11 p.m. when I left, but guests stayed on for the dancing. It was a memorable day.

Tradition, Tradition

2011-01-28T02:10:00.002-05:00

The canon fired at 7 a.m. this morning to salute the young doctors and the honorary doctors.

The Cathedral bell rang at 8 a.m.

The ceremony will take place at 12.15 p.m.

The tradition dated back to 1600.

Uppsala Uiversity was founded in 1477, and the first graduates received their degrees in the 1480s. Classes were suspended during the turbulent years of the Reformation.

The first Doctor of Theology was conferred in 1617, since then the Swedish king could appoint the doctors. This was changed in the modern period.

The first woman to receive a Doctor of Theology was in 1968.

The medieval ceremony will last for three hours, men in tails and white bow ties, women in long gowns. There will be a formal banquet in a castle afterward. The Nobel prize banquet models after the festivities of this one.

You can watch the ceremony of 2009 here.

The Silver Bible and Other Surprises

2011-01-27T15:49:00.011-05:00

The most treasured book in Uppsala is the sixth-century Silver Bible (Codex Argenteus).

While I have seen other handwritten
and beautifully decorated medieval Bibles in Europe, this is the first time I saw a codex dated back to the sixth century.

The Silver Bible contained the manuscript of the Gothic translation of the four Gospels in Greek in the fourth century. It was written in silver and in gold, and probably for the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great. The Goths were nominally Arians.

In addition to seeing the Silver Bible, Uppsala has many surprises for me. Let me begin with breakfast. I ate breakfast this morning in the hotel. It consisted of bread, cheese, egg, different cold cuts, cereal, veggie salad. Conspiciously absent were the sweet things in American breakfast: pancakes and muffins. There were also large jars of almonds, flax seeds, and walnuts.

The other surprise was which way to open the door. After I brought my luggage to my room, I tried to get out. I couldn't open the door and thought I was locked. I was pulling the door inside the room. But it should be pushed outside. I have never pushed a hotel door toward the corridor. Then I was never sure whether to push or to pull the doors.

This afternoon I gave a lecture with Powerpoint to the faulty and students of the Faculty of Theology. I asked for a lectern and was told there wasn't any. Surprise, surprise, I was asked to sit down to deliver the lecture, in a classroom in which those at the back could not see me.

I was glad to see my Swedish friends who came to the lecture: Dr. Elisabeh Gerle, an ethicist, Dr. Helene Egnell, author of Other Voices and specialist in gender and interreligious dialogue. My Olso friends Dr. Marianne Bjelland Kartzow and Dr. Anne Hege Grung also attended.

But the most enjoyable surprise was the rehearsal for tomorrow's ceremony. The Master of Ceremony began by saying that he would give a lecture before the actual rehearsal. He really gave the history of the medieval ceremony for 45 mins! It was so entertaining and I laughed so hard that tears were dripping down my face--imagine I had make-up on. . .

The recipients of honorary doctorates in theology were to receive the degrees first. Theology was the oldest faculty and queen of the sciences in the medieval period. The other person who will receive it is Professor Per-Arne Bodin of the University of Stockholm.

He presented a lecture on "At the Bath of the Hole in the Ice: On a Religious Ceremony and the Soviet Tradition." He is a specialist in the Russian Orthodox tradition. He talked about the celebration of the Christ's Baptism in Russia. The congregation would process down to a hole in the ice, often carved in the shape of the cross. After the priest blessed the water, the people would take some home, as it was thought to have healing property. Some even immersed themselves in the icy cold water. The Russian word for winter swimmers, morzj, literally means walrus. He also elaborated how this tradition figured in Chekhov's work and in Russian novels and poetry.

One fellow wrote a novel called The President's Last Love. Putin invited other presidents to take a winter bath in a hole in the ice. The Ukrainian president was able to withstand the cold. But the British Prime Minister and the American President could not. I guess Putin showed his manhood.

Uppsala

2011-01-26T09:01:00.008-05:00

The taxi driver drives a Saab. I saw the little ring about the aphabet A. So I have arrived in Sweden.

The ride from Stockholm airport to Uppsala took about half an hour, and everywhere was covered in snow. The whole country has been frozen since November, and the snow will not melt till May.

The Uppsala University is the oldest university in northern Europe, established in 1477. The Faculty of Theology was established since the beginning. Currently it has 14 faculty members and about 1,500 students, including majors and other students taking courses.

Even though it is called Theology, the Faculty of Theology also offers courses in religious studies. My host Professor Kajsa Ahlstrand teaches World Christianity and Interreligious Studies. She is a friend of my colleague Christopher Duraisingh and visits India often.

About 80% of Swedes belong to the Church of Sweden. The Uppsala Cathedral is a red brick huge building with twin towers. The Dean of the Cathedral is a woman. Out of the 14 bishops, 3 are female, including a lesbian, the Bishop of Stockholm.

Gay and lesbian couples can be married in the Church of Sweden, though some conservative bishops allow only a blessing after the civil marriage.

I asked Kajsa whether there is a schism over the issue of homosexuality within the Lutheran World Federation, just as that in the Anglican Communion. She said the polity of the LWF is quite different. First, the Lutheran church has not been an instrument of colonialization to the extent of the Anglican Church. Germany had a few colonies, but was not a huge empire, like those of the British and the French. Second, there is no equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Lutherans are more polycentric. Third, the LWF still has a lot of money and the African churches benefit from the fundings and do not want to separate from it.

In the afternoon I went to see the Cathedral. It has many side chapels and one devoted to Brigitta, the patron of Sweden and Europe. There is also a relatively new sculptor of Mary the mother of Jesus, as an adult woman dressed ina peasant long blue skirt. We often see Mary the young virgin. I was delighted to see Mary of my age. She looks human.

Archbishop Nathan Soderblom was buried in the Cathedral. Soderblom was a professor at Uppsala from 1901-1914 before he went on to become a bishop and archbishop. He was a churchman and a historian of religion. He was ahead of his time for insisting that students in theology should learn about other religious traditions.

I found out my book Chinese Women and Christianity, 1860-1927 is used as a textbook for undergraduates. It is quite expensive and does not have an eye-catching title. Yet, the students have quite good reviews of it.

This is my third time to Sweden. The first time was in Lund, where I delivered a lecture on Ecology and Christology almost 15 years ago. I was so surprised at the time to find so many Volvos on the road because Volvos are expensive cars. At Uppsala I saw Ford, Toyota, and other European cars. But the Volvos are very durable and they are still running after 25 years. I guess if you have half of the year icy and snowy, you really need a good reliable car.

I will not do much shopping here. The sale tax is 30-50 % and a pair of jeans costs more than US$200 and a T-shirt $50 at a boutique!

Tonight, I am going to have dinner with Kajsa and two of her friends from Oslo who flew here to hear my lecture tomorrow. My lecture better be good.

Transnational Political Theology

2011-01-25T14:09:00.004-05:00

Tonight I am leaving for Sweden to receive an honorary doctorate on Jan. 28 from Uppsala University. It is a great honor to be recongized by such an esteemed educational institution.

I was asked to deliver a lecture on "Transnational Political Theology in the Asia-Pacific" and see if you understand the Swedish in this announcement.

In my lecture I want to use the critical de-imperial and postcolonial theory of Taiwanese scholar Chen Kuan-Hsing, whose book Asia as Method is truly groundbreaking.

While we have heard much about cultural studies in the USA and Europe, Chen and his colleagues have been promoting inter-Asia cultural studies.

Based on his social location from Taiwan, he talks about the three phases of postcolonial work in the Asian context: de-colonization, de-Cold War, and de-imperialization.

Chen says that the legacy of colonialism has transfigured the inner structure of the cultural imaginary of both the colonizers and the colonized. Decolonizing the cultural imaginary involves the following: (1) placing colonialism at the center of analysis, (2) revealing hidden Eurocentrism, and (3) emphasyzing the relative autonomy of local history.

The shape of the cultural imaginary in a specific time and space depends on the interaction between the colonial, the historical, and the geographical. Since the nation-state is no longer sufficient to explain the workings of the globalized world, he proposes to focus on geographical spaces to develop a more appropriate understanding of the formerly colonized world in the neoliberal economy.

Instead of constanly talking to the West, he suggests inter-referencing among Asians and peoples of the Third World. Instead of the binary "the West and the rest," he proposes multiple-referencing.

I learned a great deal from his work. Political theology has become a popular subject and most of it has been done with the USA and Europe in mind. I am developing a transnational political theology from Asia-Pacific.