Jesus, Giussani & the Asian Auntie

Welcome back to our regular posting!

I just recently returned from a very fruitful conference trip organised by the Colloquium on Violence & Religion, which developed a previous post on the capacity of small spaces in moderating the tendency towards escalating rivalry. 

Now that I am back, we also took the opportunity to drop a new episode of a new season of our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians.

We began our series by talking further of our panel discussion of At the Origin of the Christian claim by Luigi Giussani earlier this year, where we were kindly invited by the Australian chapter of the movement Communion and Liberation to give feedback as non-members to this key work by the movement’s founder.

While we looked at the different passages that resonated with us, at the heart of our podcast episode coverage of the event was the centrality of the presence of Jesus Christ as the primordial condition for the Christian life.

We went as far as to say that this is more foundation to the life of faith than even belief, dogma and even encounter, since all these grow out of the first move by God, which is to make himself present in a person. And not only to make himself present in an abstract and inert way, but also in a way that actively addresses our own concrete circumstance.

To put it in the terms most Asian, this then is not the presence of an Asian grandfather as much as it is that of an Asian Auntie.

To find out how that analogy tracks, listen to our episode “Jesus, Giussani & the Asian Auntie”, out now on Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Podcasts.

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