Jonathan Tran

Moral Innovation and Ambiguity in Asian American Christianity

“The Parable of the Shrewd Manager” in Luke 16 illuminates some important features of Asian American life. Like the parable’s central character, Asian Americans live under a set of cultural expectations where success is achieved by accepting terms set by others. In America, those terms are often defined racially, where access gets indexed to one’s ethnicity, or to perceptions of one’s ethnicity. The terms can be of great benefit and can come at great cost, as was the case for managers in Jesus’ day. Understanding Asian American life requires the recognition of both sides of this dynamic. This article first examines the parable and then draws out its relevance for Asian American and Asian American Christian life, concluding with some thoughts on the relative status of normative judgment in the context of racialization.

An atheistic sense to Stanley Hauerwas’s theology

This essay argues that Stanley Hauerwas’ Christian ethics exemplifies a manner of speech that does not premise divine activity as necessary for theological judgment. An anti-constantinian reticence regarding divine activity sits at the heart of Hauerwas’ work, giving it an atheistic sense emblematic of secularized cultural conditions, marking his theology as decidedly baptist. The essay takes the form of a sustained engagement with Nicholas Healy’s incisive critique that Hauerwas disastrously joins together what should remain apart, what David Kelsey distinguishes as logics of belief and logics of coming to belief. After passing on a defensive response to Healy, the article advances a constructive response that would have theological speech take up residence between logics of belief and coming to belief, which the article re-imagines in terms of what Stanley Cavell calls “comedies of remarriage.”

The Otherness of Children as a Hint of an Outside: Michel Foucault, Richard Yates and Karl Barth on Suburban Life

Abstract The essay shows how the ordinary life of children might save suburbia from itself. Disenchanted with contemporary existence, temptations of ideality tend to both vilify and verify suburban life as banal, yet to the extent that suburban life means life with children, profound possibilities subsist in that strange world. The argument unfolds in three parts. Beginning with Michel Foucault, the author shows how power courses through every form of life, colonizing depth such that desire reveals powers most fundamental expression. Secondly, Richard Yatess Revolutionary Road exemplifies powers machinations as Yates compassionately portrays the tragedy of belittling ordinary life. Finally, the author turns to Karl Barth in order to resituate Foucaults account of immanence within a larger horizon where children might be embraced as the aleatory play of difference of Gods peace and patience.