Jesus Was What?

Welcome back everyone, and thank you for your patience as we enjoyed a well-needed break.

In the weeks just gone, I had the opportunity to return to my old stomping ground in Rome, where I got my License in Theology from the Angelicum. It was good to reconnect with my old networks after a decade and a half, and also to present a paper at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion annual meeting. That paper channelled Rene Girard’s thought on internal mediation on the issue of pornographic use and production (if you are interested, I recently wrote a review of Elias Carr’s new book on Girard’s thought, I Came to Cast Fire, which proved incredibly helpful in researching this paper).

Closer to home, I also had the opportunity to present another paper on the eschatological dimension of migrant experience, at the Dawson Society conference on the theme of “Home”. That conference was held in Perth, a city that was formative of my impressions of Australia before I came to call Australia home.

Now that I am back in the saddle, we have also done some work towards getting the second season of our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians ready for release. I am pleased to begin my return to regular posting with the release of the very first episode of season 2.

In this episode, Daniel and I decided to return to basics and explore the theme of Christology. I began by doing my best (that is, my worst) impersonation of Sophia Petrillo from the 80s sitcom The Golden Girls, before moving onto a review of the implications of the theological shorthand for the Christian faith, namely “Jesus is the Christ”.

This short and deceptively simple statement implicates Jesus’ name, title, nature and mission, in a way that gels with the purposes of this podcast insofar as puts the universality of divine revelation together with the particularity of our history. It points to God’s saving action, not only in history in the abstract, but in our histories in particular. Jesus’ name itself embodies this interface between the economy of salvation and our lives, and thus the encounter with the true God and true man.

This is elaborated in full in our episode entitled “Jesus was What?”. You can listen to this episode of the podcast on Spotify, as well as on Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.

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