Pascha, I often joke, is the first day after the Great Fast and Great and Holy Week that we who are Orthodox can eat meat without guilt. Some, of course, do so through the season shamelessly, so it is their cameras that take the break, with no pictures of meat appearing on their social media the entire Fast. Then, on Pascha, the baskets are blessed, and there they are, the day when meat re-appears on Facebook and Instagram. Some may... Read more
If there is anything by which I have been haunted over the Great Fast, it is the power of the father over my life in the creation of my consciousness as a good son. Fr Myron Panchuk, the ringleader of our Kyivan Psychoanalysis Study Group, died just before Forgiveness Sunday, and before he left this world, he said to me that it is only in the absence of the father that we come to a true form of maturity. What this... Read more
Fr Myron Panchuk used to draw a lot of significance out of the fact that he was born on the same day that the meltdown at Chornobyl happened. I was born in the same year. Today’s Great and Holy Friday coincides with the anniversary. The impetus from Fr Myron’s dissertation on the dreams of professionals in Kyiv and the images of the shattered dreams for Ukrainian peoplehood came from a dream he had. He dreamed that he was eating a... Read more
One of the lines that struck me very deeply when I first heard it in the old translation of the Novus Ordo anaphora was, Before he was given up to death, a death he freely accepted, he took bread and gave you thanks. I’m sure it was used when I was in Catholic high school, but the first time I really listened to it was while I was on retreat at my priest friend’s house of studies in Berkeley immediately after finishing... Read more
When I was about four, I once said to my elderly babysitter that my mom and dad were out with two lang lui, two pretty women. She guffawed — wahhhh! — and I knew that I had somehow made a mistake, except that I was pretty sure that these two women were beautiful. I was just at the point in my childhood development when it occurred to me that calling them jiejie, older sisters, wasn’t exactly accurate. My sister, who is younger... Read more
Paris, the Marxist geographer David Harvey argues, is the Capital of Modernity. There is a way through Harvey’s voluminous work, as he himself shows in his collected essays on the city, in which Paris as a city is the concrete thread that ties together so much of his analysis of the uneven geographies of capital. The operative concept here is creative destruction, that the modern — that is, the new — has to come out of the old being destroyed. The magical... Read more
If there is a text by which my teaching career has been defined, it is probably the Book of Genesis. I mean the word career rather loosely; it is less about my work within the institutions of academia, which do not only involve teaching (tenure is evaluated on research, collegiality by service, and relatability by community engagement), and more about the continuity between all the odd jobs I worked before I became an academic and what I currently do as an educator... Read more
Two Palm Sundays ago, I found myself in Boston for the annual geographers’ conference. I am being specific about my discipline because, for all intents and purposes, I am a secular academic. Of course, I think and write theologically — which Christian doesn’t? — but I am, by training and profession, a social and cultural geographer. I go to geography conferences, and this one was being held where all the big conventions are held in Boston, out in Back Bay.... Read more
I was eleven when my grandpa died. He was not doing well when he did. A few months before he passed, he had stopped taking his anti-psychotic medications. He was clinically depressed, and had been for quite a while before the vogue began, and was about to get into a lot of trouble for taking a pair of scissors to a neighbour’s flowers just because he liked them and wanted to take them home. As it turns out, he was... Read more
The next time some chump in any of the Christian communions says to me that Jordan Peterson is on our team because of his Jungian-not-really reading of Genesis (it is, as Sam Rocha shows, actually biologically deterministic), I will retort that the ‘debate‘ (a term that is debatable for describing what went down) that was scheduled on his home turf in Toronto between him and Slavoj Žižek took place on the New Calendar’s Good Friday. For Žižek, this day was probably... Read more
Eastern Catholic Person
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In