My friend Thea Reimer, at the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, has started a podcast entitled ‘The #RacismIsHeresy Project.’ It’s a neat experiment, affiliated with a Catholic theological school in the Latin Church, that, like a few others in theology who are curious about modes of communication in a digital age, interrogates the utility of hashtags as well as the importance of social media in theological work.
Thea has done me the flattery of attributing the idea of this project to my ‘coining’ of the hashtag ‘SexismIsHeresy’ on an older Twitter account. The truth is that, at the time, I was trying to figure out my relationship to the New Calvinism of my youth as an Eastern Catholic in my first year of mystagogy and really thought of it in the heat of the moment. If Thea thought of ‘#RacismIsHeresy’ from watching me muddle through my oedipal complex with evangelicalism at the time, then the credit really goes to her.
Still, Thea has honoured me with the first interview in the series. It was an opportunity to share what I had learned from my mystagogical steeping in the Kyivan Church, especially with my sisters and brothers at St Mary of Egypt Social Justice Fellowship, about race and anti-colonialism in the practice of Byzantine Orthodoxy in the contemporary world. As I say in the podcast, I am just a lay person in the Greek-Catholic Church of Kyiv. My theological knowledge is born out of being part of this family and praying in its midst as we make Christ present together in the liturgies we serve.
I’m thankful to Thea for making this podcast happen, as well as to the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology for this bold new venture. I look forward to following Thea’s journey in learning from people, most of whom will be wiser and more knowledgeable than me, about the connections between racism and heresy, the construal of orthodoxy in the modern world, and its continuing relevance in the circulation of digital publics.
Justin K.H. Tse 