In this episode, Matt and Dan contemplate two of life’s great mysteries: plants and potatoes and, by a winding path that would make perfect sense in a Chinese garden, the joys of priesthood.

The Asians approach priesthood without focusing exclusively on priests. This is partly for the obvious reason that neither of them is one, and partly because fomenting class warfare within the Church seems like a poor use of an afternoon. More importantly, however, it is because Christian priesthood only makes sense when we begin with Christ and his Church.

Matt and Dan explore the persistent temptation to imagine the Church as something done by priests while everybody else watches, occasionally volunteers and brings a plate.

Against this, they recover the biblical vision of the People of God as a priestly people: the continuation and fulfilment of Israel’s vocation as a kingdom of priests, in which every member of Christ’s Body shares, according to their own calling, in his priestly mission.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, this leads the Asians not first to Holy Orders but to matrimony. Marriage offers a particularly concrete example of how the baptised exercise their priestly vocation: receiving the ordinary stuff of human life - love, work, children, suffering, meals, money, ageing parents, burnt rice – and learning to offer it to God. Beneath every vocation, then, lies the same deep root: baptism. Like water finding its way through a rice terrace, baptism draws every Christian into the life of Christ and therefore into his priesthood, his self-offering and his mission.

None of this makes the ordained priesthood less important. Quite the opposite. Matt and Dan consider how the ministerial priesthood serves the priesthood of the whole Church, and how both find their meaning in the great movement at the heart of Christian existence: receiving creation as gift and, through Christ, offering it back to the Father. There may also be potatoes.

Matt and Dan begin by demonstrating that they learnt absolutely nothing from their previous episode, returning almost immediately to their unconscious devotion to the rubrics - and, with the serene confidence of an auntie rearranging your kitchen, innovation at exactly the same time.

This naturally, or perhaps unnaturally, becomes a discussion about complexity and what the Asians detect as a cultural crusade against it: the conviction that everything, including the intellectual and spiritual life, ought to be made simple, preferably before the tea gets cold.

But when did simplicity become a measure of value?

The Asians consider simplicity not merely as a technique, occasionally useful and occasionally not, but as an ideology which, like an overenthusiastic relative with a cleaver, can reduce something complicated into manageable pieces while insisting nothing important has been lost.

This becomes rather more concerning when it wanders into the life of the Church, where the demand for simplicity can quietly become a demand for reduction: of legitimate diversity, mystery, creativity, and the wonderfully inconvenient lifeworld of historical faith. Some things, after all, are more dumpling than chicken nugget: what matters is folded inside, and flattening them rather defeats the point.

The Asians then consider what this drive towards simplicity actually does to theology, liturgy, and ecclesial life—and whether a faith concerned with the inexhaustible mystery of God was ever supposed to fit neatly on a slide, even if the slide has very good branding.

In this episode, Daniel and Matt begin with the enduring contribution of Chinese cuisine to Australian civilisation before taking an unexpected detour into the murky world of idolatry.

Along the way they dismantle the popular idea that idols are simply pagan statues or foreign gods and ask a far more uncomfortable question: what actually receives our deepest loyalty, trust and desire?

Drawing on Scripture, the Church Fathers and a little Greek word-nerdery (because, of course, everything is Greek), they argue that idolatry is less about explicit acts of worship and more about the quiet ways we organise our lives around success, security, comfort, status and control. Golden calves are easy to spot. The idols of calendars, careers, culture, relationships and our own ambitions are considerably harder.

Expect the usual awkward Asian tangents, a healthy dose of self-deprecating humour, an Augustinian twist, and a surprisingly important discussion about logos... and pickles. By the end, you'll discover that idolatry isn't simply about worshipping the wrong god, but about loving good things in the wrong order. Come for the theological dumplings but stay for the spiritual examination of conscience.

Resources

Succulent Chinese Meal

The Asians are back!

Armed with highlighted books, unearned anxiety, and the emotional resilience of jasmine tea, Matt and Dan kick off a new season reflecting on their first (entirely unofficial) live event: a Communion & Liberation panel launching the second edition of Luigi Giussani's At the Origin of the Christian Claim.

Somewhere between Giussani, Chinese family dynamics, and a theological detour into Pokémon, they argue that Christianity isn't an exam to ace or a family reputation to maintain - despite what certain Asian grandfathers may imply - but an encounter with the living Christ who keeps turning up in ordinary life like the auntie who arrives unannounced, cuts up fruit, and quietly rearranges your life.

The Gospel isn't how you "win" at life. It's how you witness through life. Not by mastering Christian content, but by belonging to the sympathetic presence of Christ.

We also discuss why the ultimate stress test for Catholic theology is teaching high school students, and why Pokémon may be more evangelically significant than anyone intended.

Like every good Chinese banquet, you'll leave wondering what just happened - but somehow, you'll still want dessert.

Resources

Fr John O'Connor: Food for Faith

The Asians close the season by talking about life’s ordinary things. Matt insists the meaning of life is steam - the sigh above a bamboo basket, - but beneath it all, what we are really searching for is home.

For migrants, “Where do you come from?” is never a simple question. The answer is layered: birthplace and accent, memory and longing, language half-forgotten at the dinner table, stories carried across oceans in reused plastic bags. But for Christians, the answer becomes stranger still: even those settled in one place are taught they are pilgrims, living between worlds.

So Matt and Dan wander through the idea of home itself — memory, longing, belonging, and desire. Following Augustine like two tired uncles carrying groceries uphill, the Asians revisit the old saying that home is where the heart is, discovering that the heart itself is restless until it rests in God.

In the end, the Asians suggest that the Christian life may simply be a long homesickness: learning where, and to whom, the heart truly belongs.

Resources

Pritvi Prakash & Ashwyn: Home is Where the Heart

Matthew Tan: Catholic Migrant Identity After Augustine, Bonaventure and Ratzinger

In this episode of Awkward Asian Theologians, things get personal - or at least as personal as Asians tend to get: somewhere between offering you fruit and quietly judging your life choices. We begin, as all serious theological reflection should, with the mysterious aesthetics of the Chinese neighbour’s front-yard market garden - equal parts abundance and chaos, bok choy and bitter melon staging a silent protest against suburban landscaping norms. From there, we make a graceful (read: slightly abrupt) pivot into another cherished pastime: contemplating the thinkers who have tilled the soil of Matt and Dan’s theological imaginations.

There are the usual suspects, of course - but also a few unexpected guests at the banquet table. Alongside familiar Western voices, you’ll find fellow Asian thinkers, a hint of French philosophical flair (because what is theology without at least a little existential seasoning?), and a wide-ranging cast of ancient and modern figures who refuse to stay in their assigned categories.

What unfolds is more than a reading list. It’s a conversation about how theology is actually done: how it listens and speaks, how it engages contemporary culture (sometimes like a gentle calligrapher’s brush, sometimes like a wok tossed over high heat), and how it carries wisdom across time and place. As the discussion deepens, something curious emerges - some of the most “Western” influences turn out to be less Western than expected. The lines blur, the labels loosen, and the whole map starts to look a bit improvised.

If you think you can predict who makes the list, the answers may surprise you - like being sent home with Chinese leftovers you didn’t ask for but will digest with delight.

Resources

Simon Oliver: Introduction to Nouvelle Theologie

Matt Tan's book: A Theological Engagement with Pornography

It begins, innocently enough, with the weather – autumnal and aggressively mundane. The kind of long-weekend observation that should go nowhere.

And yet, set against the quiet gravity of ANZAC weekend with its memory of sacrifice, service, and a national story marked by both courage and cost, it doesn’t stay small for long. In trueAwkward Asian Theologians fashion, the conversation spirals into something far less containable: a meditation on power.

Not the obvious kind - titles, authority, or who controls the group chat - but the subtler force that lingers in the background of things. The kind that shapes identities over time: habits, expectations, instincts you never consciously chose. Power that forms even as it limits, that is carried, absorbed and endured.

Drawing from both cultural experience and Catholic imagination, Matt and Dan circle this idea of power as something more than oppressive – as something quietly productive, even creative, shaping who we are beneath the level of awareness. Like calligraphy ink bleeding just slightly beyond the brushstroke, it works subtly, persistently, almost without notice – far more feng shui than force. Especially on a weekend like this, where memory itself becomes a kind of power, the question isn’t just who has it, but how it settles into us, rearranges us, and lingers like the last sip of tea gone cool.

Naturally, this leads to Scripture, which refuses to leave power comfortably defined. In Jesus Christ, power is not discarded but transfigured from the inside - expressed through self-gift, humility, and a disarming refusal to play by expected rules. Strength looks like surrender and divine authority looks like service. What emerges is not a denial of power, but a far more demanding vision of it – one that presses into the texture of our everyday Christian lives.

Somewhere between the crisp autumn air and the Gospel, it becomes clear that power is not just something we talk about. It’s something we’re already participating in.

Man and Dan return again to the basics. This time it is the parish, less like a system and more like a crowded yum cha table.

You arrive and the dishes are already in motion. Someone is insisting you try the chicken feet, and the lazy Susan turns whether you’re ready or not. You take what comes, and yet somehow it becomes yours.

So too, the parish. It unsettles our neat, menu-like idea of faith as clearly defined and properly ordered. Instead, faith begins not as propositions but as people in awkward space. Somewhat inconveniently, the Body of Christ involves actual bodies, bodies that crowd, linger, misread social cues, and yet still belong.

And yet it is precisely within this complication that the comfort of faith emerges, because orthodoxy here is not merely a matter of alignment with truth, but of commitment, and not only your own commitment, but the commitment of others to you.

You do not simply choose the Church; rather, you find yourself, often quietly and somewhat irreversibly, included within it, drawn into a shared life that precedes your full understanding of it.

The table continues to turn, the dishes continue to come, and you discover, almost in a Wong Kar-wai kind of way, that you are expected not only to remain, but to belong.

Resources

Lumen Gentium: On the People of God