Awkward Asian Theologians

In this hot and saucy episode, Matt and Dan talk about the body, clearing their throats and looking briefly at the floor.

They note how ideas of the body have arranged our thinking the way ancestors arrange furniture: without asking, and in ways that are hard to undo.

The Asians begin with flesh and posture, with the inconvenience of weight and the awkwardness of taking up space. But the body does not stay singular for long. It multiplies. It becomes social, cultural, ritual—something trained into us like table manners, learned before we know we are learning.

Embodiment, they suggest, is not only biological but also borrowed, practiced, and remembered. Without bodies of this kind, life resembles calligraphy written in the air: conceptually elegant, existentially useless.

They wrap things up by turning, somewhat carefully, to the Body of Christ. Here the body is neither obstacle nor escape hatch, but vocation: many bodies, uneven and ordinary, arranged like bowls at a communal table, held together by a dignity that is both transcendent and stubbornly human.

Resources
Jeffrey Bishop: The Anticipatory Corpse
Matthew John Paul Tan: Pornography & Christology

Welcome to our third season.
The Asians (no longer Matt and Dan as unique individuals) look at racism, not so much as a political issue, but an issue that is finding its way into the life of the Church.
As such, they look at the question of racism as a theological issue, and ask if racism can be a form of heresy.
To answer this, they look to the Christological debates in the early Church, and highlight how the heresies that drove those debates back then are finding their way in modern form.
In doing so, they reemphasise how a proper attention to key facets of the Christological dogmas - such as the hypostatic union and the incarnation - can inform a properly theological response to racism, insofar as racism takes up Christological heresies and applies them to anthropology. Conversely, they also highlight how a proper Christology can give salvific effect to all particularities - including the particularities of faith - insofar as they have all been relativised in Christ.
Flowing from that, the Asians look at how racism then has a spillover effect to the ecclesial dimension of faith, and wounds the Body of Christ by attacking its unity.

Resources
Pius XI: Mit Brennender Sorge

Matt and Dan close out the season by steaming up a conversation on nostalgia.
They start with food (of course) and how something as simple as a bowl of congee or a forgotten jar of Lao Gan Ma can open the floodgates of memory. But nostalgia isn’t just about taste - it’s about longing for a home, a church, a culture that might never have existed the way we remember it.
 From there, they stir-fry their way through questions of identity: Why do so many of us romanticize worlds we’ve never actually known - including “golden age” Catholicism filtered through incense and Instagram filters? They also tackle the Catholic nostalgia industrial complex—that sense that the Church was somehow “more real” when everyone spoke Latin and the incense was thicker than hotpot steam. Matt and Dan ask what happens when we crave spiritual authenticity the way our aunties crave imported soy sauce: maybe we start worshiping the memory instead of the mystery.
 Drawing inspiration from a fourth-century monastic text, the Asians explore how nostalgia can paralyse the soul. When we misremember the past, we risk rejecting God’s presence in the messy, beautiful now. Because maybe holiness isn’t in chasing the lost imperial banquet – it’s in finding grace in the leftover dumplings we have today.

Evagrius of Pontus: Eight Logismoi

In this episode, Matt and Dan do what good Catholics do: overthink their vocations. But this time, they’re not just being Catholic laymen but being Chinese Catholic laymen (yes, it matters, and yes, we’ll unpack that).

Matt goes off about the Church’s unspoken two-track economy - one clerical and another lay, while Dan wonders aloud if theology has a built-in side-eye for the laity as “the non-ordained”.
Then the two wander into the papal magisterium (because we contain multitudes) and discover not just a grudging nod toward the idea of a theologically trained laity, but an actual theology of the laity. Wild. So why, they ask, do we still act like being lay is a consolation prize and not an actual calling?

Finally, in a rare moment of optimism, they look back at moments in Church history when it was precisely the laity who held things together - the unsung, unpaid, unordained backbone of Catholic life – and they ask what that history might mean for how the laity live out the Church’s mission today. Come for the ecclesiology, stay for the low-key identity crisis.

Resources:
John Paul II: Christafidelis Laici
Lumen Gentium Ch. IV: The Laity

Matt and Dan (yes, the Asians) go full Catholic and talk about Mary, “the tigerest of tiger mums”. The one who said “yes” to God with the kind of fierce loyalty that only an Asian mum could pull off. They dive into how Mary's fiat isn't just a theological yes, it’s the ultimate immigrant mum move: sacrificial, strategic, and quietly revolutionary.
 
From knockoff Marian statues in Chinatown shrines to Our Lady rocking hanfu, we unpack how Mary becomes a cultural chameleon, enfleshing the Gospel in a thousand tongues and ten thousand images.
 
They also chop through some of the bad theology out there: no, Mary isn't the fourth person of the Trinity. Yes, she matters deeply in salvation history. And yes, Protestant friends, you can talk about her without spontaneously combusting.
 
In the end, we find that Mary is the kind of figure who doesn't just belong in Catholic kitsch or incense-soaked altars - she offers Good News to all Christians. With tiger stripes and tenderness, Mary mothers us into mystery.

Resources
Dicastry for Promoting Christian Unity: Mary - Grace and Hope in Christ