How Yellow Was My Mochi?

The second episode of our second season dropped in the past weekend, and is possibly our yellowest episode yet.

In “How Yellow Was My Mochi”, we canvassed the issue of representation. More specifically, Daniel Ang and I covered what giving an Asian voice to theology looks like.

As we discovered in the episode, there was much more to representation than meets the eye. Going further, it is much more relevant to the spiritual life of the Christian than meets the eye.

On the one hand, the notion of representation is not simply a political tack on, and thus an optional extra. Instead, if we are to take the incarnation as a cultural event seriously, then we have to contend with the idea that identities are both caught up and vehicles for the communication of grace. Moreover, our identities constitute our labour which in turn make us receptive to the workings of grace.

On the other hand, the fact that identities are immanent cultural products of our labour also means that identities are never static. More to the point, they are temporary and thus partial. There will always be a contingency to our identities, which also means that what we presume to be our sense of self, or a sense of place in the world, will always be incomplete. No amount of labouring on our part is going to make that complete, which means that there is a crucial role that grace has in completing our identities. Against this backdrop, Dan and I look at the relevance of the Eucharistic liturgy in completing that which is incomplete.

You can learn more about these in our episode “How Yellow Was My Mochi”, which you can listen in full on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.