Awkward Asian Theologians

The Asians close the season by talking about life’s ordinary things. Matt insists the meaning of life is steam - the sigh above a bamboo basket, - but beneath it all, what we are really searching for is home. For migrants, “Where do you come from?” is never a simple question. The answer is layered: birthplace and accent, memory and longing, language half-forgotten at the dinner table, stories carr...

In this episode of Awkward Asian Theologians , things get personal - or at least as personal as Asians tend to get: somewhere between offering you fruit and quietly judging your life choices. We begin, as all serious theological reflection should, with the mysterious aesthetics of the Chinese neighbour’s front-yard market garden - equal parts abundance and chaos, bok choy and bitter melon staging...

It begins, innocently enough, with the weather – autumnal and aggressively mundane. The kind of long-weekend observation that should go nowhere. And yet, set against the quiet gravity of ANZAC weekend with its memory of sacrifice, service, and a national story marked by both courage and cost, it doesn’t stay small for long. In true Awkward Asian Theologians fashion, the conversation spirals into s...

Man and Dan return again to the basics. This time it is the parish, less like a system and more like a crowded yum cha table. You arrive and the dishes are already in motion. Someone is insisting you try the chicken feet, and the lazy Susan turns whether you’re ready or not. You take what comes, and yet somehow it becomes yours. So too, the parish. It unsettles our neat, menu-like idea of faith as...

The Asians step into the strange gravity of beauty, the transcendental that turns vibes into metaphysics. Engaging beauty as the "Metamucil of metaphysics", Matt and Dan dive into the depths of this dietary fiber of the soul. It is not glamorous, but without it everything backs up. Civilizations wobble. Liturgies lose their center. Even your aunties group chat starts to feel spiritually...

Matt and Dan begin, as serious Asians often do, over a bowl of pho - debating broth, coriander, and the hierarchy of condiments - before realising they’re circling a deeper question: what actually feeds a Catholic? From Vietnamese comfort food, they pivot to the stranger, more demanding meal - the Eucharist.   They reflect on the parish as the place where Catholics fulfil their most primordial voc...

Matt and Dan begin with a mid-Lent wrist inspection, checking for spiritual pulse and early signs of influencer disease. It’s that penitential time of year when you ask: am I fasting from meat, or am I fasting from relevance? This episode they turn to celebrity, especially the Christian habit of baptising it and calling it evangelisation. Platform equals influence equals Gospel. Simple math but su...

On the cusp of Lent, with a culture and a world sparring with itself like an uncoordinated kung fu film, Matt and Dan cheerfully wander into very heavy territory: world pain. (Yes, that escalated quickly). Is world pain just regular pain with a global subscription? Or is it something else entirely, like a low-grade ache in the bones of the world, humming beneath the headlines, moving through us th...

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...

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 high...

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 th...

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-ord...

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 Chinat...

Matt and Dan are back at it again — stir-frying their brains in the theological wok of suffering . This week, they dig deeper into Pope John Paul II’s Salvifici Doloris , a document with more spiritual depth than your Ah Ma’s silent judgment. Why do humans not just suffer , but also spiral into deep thoughts about suffering? Is this a grace, or just another form of divine trolling? Matt and Dan ch...

It’s September which, as every Chinese auntie knows, means ghost month is over but the suffering of the long year has just begun. In this episode, Matt and Dan slip into the bitter oolong of theological reflection and sip slowly on the paradox of suffering: the kind that doesn’t go away when you pray harder, and the kind that doesn’t get prettier when you quote Romans 8 at it. Framing the conversa...

Welcome to Awkward Asian Theologians , where Matt and Dan embark on their most swoon-worthy, heart-fluttering episode yet - a theological deep dive into love .   They unpack why a band called Foreigner penned the immortal anthem “I Want to Know What Love Is” - because, spoiler alert, someone else might just have a better grip on love than we do. But beyond the catchy chorus and cheesy 80s power ba...

Matt and Dan sit down with a pot of oolong and a question: What happens when people move – and the Church moves with them? In this episode, they poke around the tangled roots between migration and the makeup of the global and local Church. Like a bamboo grove shaped by wind and soil, the Church grows along the fault lines of human movement, and it’s anything but static. They also untangle a very a...

Matt and Dan kick things off by casually showing off their wristwear, channelling peak Asian salaryman energy, before limping valiantly into the Church’s missionary posture (not that posture, you degenerate). Along the way, they acknowledge the burnout risk faced by missionaries, like it’s Lunar New Year and they’re the last firecracker still sparking. In a move bound to disappoint the ancestors,...

Matt and Dan go meta, like two lost dumplings floating in a bowl of hot broth, trying to figure out what it means to do things “Asianly.” They untangle the knots of representation and the elusive “Asian standpoint”, confess to using a smorgasbord of labels - the made-up tags that others love to slap on them - and wonder: could we swap these out for something purely Asian? Maybe a porcelain teapot?...

Matt and Dan kick off the new season by going full ying-yang – back to the basics. And by basics, we mean Jesus. That’s right: before we talk Resurrection, redemption, or rewatching Wong Kar-wai films for spiritual insight, we’re starting at the source. Who is Jesus? What’s up with his name? And why does it matter that he’s both God and human, king and servant, fully divine and yet creating awkwar...

In this second instalment of the two-part meditation on faith, Matt and Dan move from Asia’s unique spiritual terrain toward a more universal grammar of belief. Defying the expectations of tiger mums, they explore faith not as a possession or passport, but as a living rhythm—more pilgrimage than property. Along the way, they challenge some sticky assumptions: that faith is an identity badge, a doc...

Our most Asian episode yet! Matt extols the hidden mystery of Australian country Chinese cuisine, while Dan riffs on the situation of Christians across Asia. He debunks the myth that Christian faith in the region has simply been a proxy for colonialism or a late addition to the Chinese religious menu. They end by asking what it means to be fully Christian and fully Asian, concluding it is an incre...

Matt and Dan light a joss stick for the ancestors and crack open a very special (and slightly spicy) episode of Awkward Asian Theologians - this time, in memory of the dearly departed Pope Francis. Yes, the Argentinian Pope who said “Pachamama” out loud in the Vatican and lived to tell the tale.   They reflect on a papacy that was as chaotically beautiful as your auntie's home altar: a bit clutter...

This is the second installment of a two-parter on the theme of mystery. Matt and Dan use more big words to talk about how divine mystery makes itself incarnate into our experience. They also talk about how Christian grappling of divine mystery should lead to a certain posture, one that brings us to our knees rather than inflates our heads. Look out for the use of the term "sacramental ontology".

Matt and Dan begin a two-parter on what mystery is and entails. They use big words like "epistemology", and warn us about the risk of reducing mystery to a jingoistic stopping of further reflection on the life of faith. They also warn us about the conceit of thinking one's way to salvation, instead of truly encountering the complexity of reality and God's working his way through...