Crouching Tiger, Hidden Panda

Over the weekend, Daniel and I dropped our latest episode of our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians, looking at the subject of power.

More specifically, we looked in this episode at the subject of power as conceived within the Church. We shared the impression that the subject of power is one of those areas where the risk of those in the church thinking along the patterns of this world (Rom 12:2). While not dealt with in great detail in our episode on nostalgia, we hinted here that one of the unstated presumptions of a Catholic’s nostalgia for the past is not simply that it is a manufactured past, but that the manufactured past is tied up with exertions of temporal power.

This then led to distinctions being made about our presumptions of power for, as we would say later in the episode, there is a limited aspect in which power has a legitimate place in the life of the Church. In this context, we distinguished between the secular notion of power as exertion on the one hand, and the Christological redefintion of power marked by the way of humility on the other.

We then looked at the life of a samurai, named Blessed Takayama Ukon (1553-1615), whose life needed to straddle both conceptions of power, and which eventually won out.

“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Panda” can be listened to in full on Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Podcast.