My final post on Patheos

Today, I wrote my final post on Patheos. As I told the Catholic channel editor Rebecca Bratten Weiss when I resigned a few weeks ago, I am leaving on very good terms. The community of writers on the Catholic channel has been a dream to work with, and I hope that the friendships I’ve made there will last a lifetime and maybe even spin off into new projects. I’ve written my heart out there, literally, in keeping with the words of the original channel editor who brought me there in the first place, the philosopher of education Sam Rocha.

Writing for Patheos has been the fulfillment of an aspiration of mine since I was in graduate school. Then, a few of us started a blog called A Christian Thing hoping to write about how we negotiated the secular academy as persons of faith. We aspired to be a group blog not unlike the Catholic portal Vox Nova, which challenged the neoconservative lines that had become standard in American Catholicism with fresh new voices. We also looked to the conversations that were happening on Patheos, a portal of blogs that seemed to break new ground in allowing persons across religious and theological traditions to write deeply about their faiths, even if it sometimes made for some personal discomfort. As a postdoctoral fellow, I studied with James Wellman at the University of Washington, who also wrote on American religion on his Patheos Progressive Christian blog.

I always wanted to be part of the Catholic channel, though I haven’t always been Catholic. It was suggested to me before I was received into the Greek-Catholic Church of Kyiv that I might consider writing for the Evangelical or Progressive Christian channels, as my practice of Anglicanism might be amenable to both. The trouble was that there are, broadly speaking, three streams of practice in the Anglican Communion — evangelical, broad church, and Anglo-Catholic — and despite getting along with people in all three, my convictions, mostly shaped by my scholarly involvement in the critical revision of the secularization thesis afforded by John Milbank, Charles Taylor, and Talal Asad, tended to be more Catholic, in the sense of attempting to tap directly into how the world is constituted and sustained by the supernatural. A Catholic sensibility presumes that the path to such connection is primarily personal, through the person who at the end of the day is, in a variation of what the ancient monastic Macarius the Great put it in his meditations on the visions of the Prophet Ezekiel, a face faced by others. It is the interrelation with a world that is primarily spiritual that is what is universal in the sense of Catholicism, a sublime connectedness with the divine that is common to all humanity and throughout all creation. After my formal reception into the Kyivan Church, I was also received onto the blog, with the name Eastern Catholic Person.

It would be a mistake to think that the blog title made me a sort of representation of Eastern Catholicism. On Patheos alone, there are at least three Eastern Catholic blogs other than mine, such as Henry Karlson’s Little Bit of Nothing, Chase Padusniak’s Japplers and Janglers, and Pete Vere’s Orthodoxy in Communion with Rome, as well as the Pezzulos’ writing on Steel Magnificat about their own forays through Byzantine churches. The name of the blog was much more about being a person who has now found myself in an Eastern Catholic church, much to my own surprise. It took three years to blog through that story and to admit that I really have found my way home.

The reason for my resignation is simple: with a new permanent academic position, I simply cannot do everything. As it is, the blog is going dormant today, the exact date of its third anniversary. It is poetic that when Rocha brought me on, he said he’d give me three years to narrate myself. It is now exactly three years, and I’m done with the narration, there at least.

I am beyond grateful to my channel editor Rebecca Bratten Weiss for being such a stellar editor and for making my transition so smooth. My heart is very full, and in this last week there, I’ve written three summary posts that sum up the themes that have threaded through my writing there: an Asian American racial politics drawn from my upbringing in the San Francisco Bay Area, the unraveling of what I have called the ‘private consensus’ as I have become more engaged with the theoretical practice of psychoanalysis, and my mystagogy as an Asian American evangelical who entered the Kyivan Church while engaging with Hong Kong protests and black feminism. The posts there, as is all my writing online, remain copyrighted, and the rights to them remain mine for future revision, re-publication, and development. I think I might do that eventually. But now I have to focus on my new position, and I depart from Patheos, a portal for which I have always dreamed of writing, with gratitude and a very full heart.