Awkward Asian Theologians

Matthew Tan and Daniel Ang
  • 5.0 (2)
  • CHRISTIANITY

Awkward Asian Theologians is the audio project of AwkwardAsianTheologian.com, and is a collaboration between Matthew Tan (Dean of Studies at Vianney College Seminary in the Diocese of Wagga Wagga) and Daniel Ang (Director of the Archdiocese of Sydney's Centre for Evangelisation). Each fortnight, the podcast brings academic theology to lived life as seen through the eyes of two Australian Catholic laymen, and doing so asianly.

  1. 1D AGO

    S3E4 Vanity of Vanities: Celebrity

    Matt and Dan begin with a mid-Lent wrist inspection, checking for spiritual pulse and early signs of influencer disease. It’s that penitential time of year when you ask: am I fasting from meat, or am I fasting from relevance?This episode they turn to celebrity, especially the Christian habit of baptising it and calling it evangelisation. Platform equals influence equals Gospel. Simple math but suspicious theology.The Asians suggest celebrity isn’t a neutral bamboo steamer. It’s more like hotpot broth: everything you drop in starts tasting like the algorithm. The influencer world doesn’t just spread the message; it reformats reality around visibility, scale, and engagement. Authority becomes follower count and community becomes audience.​While recognising  technology can serve the Church, platform tempts us to believe that big means blessed, instant means intimate, and online means incarnational enough.The deeper pastoral problem isn’t scandal or bad takes but that the Church’s imagination gets quietly rewired, reconfiguring even the conception of faith within the Church. The Body of Christ risks becoming a network. In the end, they offer the unfashionable answer: what nurtures Christian faith isn’t celebrity. It’s Word, Sacrament, and a stubbornly local people gathered in the flesh Asian style. The Gospel doesn’t need to trend; it needs to leaven.Resources Matthew Tan: Bobblehead Church Sherry Turkle: Alone Together Jodi Dean: Blog Theory

    36 min

  2. FEB 13

    S3E3 Does Everybody Hurt: World Pain

    On the cusp of Lent, with a culture and a world sparring with itself like an uncoordinated kung fu film, Matt and Dan cheerfully wander into very heavy territory: world pain. (Yes, that escalated quickly). Is world pain just regular pain with a global subscription? Or is it something else entirely, like a low-grade ache in the bones of the world, humming beneath the headlines, moving through us the way qi moves through a body, impossible to localise and hard to ignore? Along the way, Matt and Dan poke at some of our default assumptions about pain, especially the modern instinct to bottle it up like it’s a private prescription. Drawing on the Romantics, philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and theologians such as Joseph Ratzinger, they explore a more classical (and frankly more Chinese) intuition: that we are not sealed units but porous beings, caught in a web of relationships. When the world’s balance is off, we feel it. When creation groans, it’s not just background noise - it’s in our joints, our sleep, our prayers. For Christians, the conversation sharpens further. How does the Cross have to say about world pain? This isn’t a moody stroll through melancholy, nor an invitation to wallow in sadness like a tragic Asian poet by a riverbank. It’s closer to an ancient physician’s diagnosis: paying attention to what hurts, not to despair, but to learn how healing might begin = even as we live in the world without finally being of it. Heavy stuff and a little awkward. Slightly unsettling but something we are all feeling. And, somehow, we hope, quietly hopeful. Resources Tim Brinkoff: Is the State of the World Causing You Pain? Sally Davies: The Body as Mediator

    28 min

  3. JAN 30

    S3E2 So Worth It: Bodies

    In this hot and saucy episode, Matt and Dan talk about the body, clearing their throats and looking briefly at the floor. They note how ideas of the body have arranged our thinking the way ancestors arrange furniture: without asking, and in ways that are hard to undo. The Asians begin with flesh and posture, with the inconvenience of weight and the awkwardness of taking up space. But the body does not stay singular for long. It multiplies. It becomes social, cultural, ritual—something trained into us like table manners, learned before we know we are learning. Embodiment, they suggest, is not only biological but also borrowed, practiced, and remembered. Without bodies of this kind, life resembles calligraphy written in the air: conceptually elegant, existentially useless. They wrap things up by turning, somewhat carefully, to the Body of Christ. Here the body is neither obstacle nor escape hatch, but vocation: many bodies, uneven and ordinary, arranged like bowls at a communal table, held together by a dignity that is both transcendent and stubbornly human. Resources Jeffrey Bishop: The Anticipatory Corpse Matthew John Paul Tan: Pornography & Christology

    27 min

  4. JAN 16

    S3E1 Blindfolded by Dental Floss: Racism

    Welcome to our third season. The Asians (no longer Matt and Dan as unique individuals) look at racism, not so much as a political issue, but an issue that is finding its way into the life of the Church. As such, they look at the question of racism as a theological issue, and ask if racism can be a form of heresy. To answer this, they look to the Christological debates in the early Church, and highlight how the heresies that drove those debates back then are finding their way in modern form. In doing so, they reemphasise how a proper attention to key facets of the Christological dogmas - such as the hypostatic union and the incarnation - can inform a properly theological response to racism, insofar as racism takes up Christological heresies and applies them to anthropology. Conversely, they also highlight how a proper Christology can give salvific effect to all particularities - including the particularities of faith - insofar as they have all been relativised in Christ. Flowing from that, the Asians look at how racism then has a spillover effect to the ecclesial dimension of faith, and wounds the Body of Christ by attacking its unity. Resources Pius XI: Mit Brennender Sorge

    39 min

  5. 11/14/2025

    S2E10 Dreaming of Dumplings: Nostalgia

    Matt and Dan close out the season by steaming up a conversation on nostalgia. They start with food (of course) and how something as simple as a bowl of congee or a forgotten jar of Lao Gan Ma can open the floodgates of memory. But nostalgia isn’t just about taste - it’s about longing for a home, a church, a culture that might never have existed the way we remember it.  From there, they stir-fry their way through questions of identity: Why do so many of us romanticize worlds we’ve never actually known - including “golden age” Catholicism filtered through incense and Instagram filters? They also tackle the Catholic nostalgia industrial complex—that sense that the Church was somehow “more real” when everyone spoke Latin and the incense was thicker than hotpot steam. Matt and Dan ask what happens when we crave spiritual authenticity the way our aunties crave imported soy sauce: maybe we start worshiping the memory instead of the mystery.  Drawing inspiration from a fourth-century monastic text, the Asians explore how nostalgia can paralyse the soul. When we misremember the past, we risk rejecting God’s presence in the messy, beautiful now. Because maybe holiness isn’t in chasing the lost imperial banquet – it’s in finding grace in the leftover dumplings we have today. Evagrius of Pontus: Eight Logismoi

    26 min

  6. 10/31/2025

    S2E9 Pray, Pay & Obey: Laity

    In this episode, Matt and Dan do what good Catholics do: overthink their vocations. But this time, they’re not just being Catholic laymen but being Chinese Catholic laymen (yes, it matters, and yes, we’ll unpack that). Matt goes off about the Church’s unspoken two-track economy - one clerical and another lay, while Dan wonders aloud if theology has a built-in side-eye for the laity as “the non-ordained”. Then the two wander into the papal magisterium (because we contain multitudes) and discover not just a grudging nod toward the idea of a theologically trained laity, but an actual theology of the laity. Wild. So why, they ask, do we still act like being lay is a consolation prize and not an actual calling? Finally, in a rare moment of optimism, they look back at moments in Church history when it was precisely the laity who held things together - the unsung, unpaid, unordained backbone of Catholic life – and they ask what that history might mean for how the laity live out the Church’s mission today. Come for the ecclesiology, stay for the low-key identity crisis. Resources: John Paul II: Christafidelis Laici Lumen Gentium Ch. IV: The Laity

    42 min

  7. 10/17/2025

    S2E8 Heaven's Tiger Mum: Mary

    Matt and Dan (yes, the Asians) go full Catholic and talk about Mary, “the tigerest of tiger mums”. The one who said “yes” to God with the kind of fierce loyalty that only an Asian mum could pull off. They dive into how Mary's fiat isn't just a theological yes, it’s the ultimate immigrant mum move: sacrificial, strategic, and quietly revolutionary.   From knockoff Marian statues in Chinatown shrines to Our Lady rocking hanfu, we unpack how Mary becomes a cultural chameleon, enfleshing the Gospel in a thousand tongues and ten thousand images.   They also chop through some of the bad theology out there: no, Mary isn't the fourth person of the Trinity. Yes, she matters deeply in salvation history. And yes, Protestant friends, you can talk about her without spontaneously combusting.   In the end, we find that Mary is the kind of figure who doesn't just belong in Catholic kitsch or incense-soaked altars - she offers Good News to all Christians. With tiger stripes and tenderness, Mary mothers us into mystery. Resources Dicastry for Promoting Christian Unity: Mary - Grace and Hope in Christ

    25 min

  8. 10/03/2025

    S2E7 Woe is (Hokkien) Mee: Suffering (Part II)

    Matt and Dan are back at it again — stir-frying their brains in the theological wok of suffering. This week, they dig deeper into Pope John Paul II’s Salvifici Doloris, a document with more spiritual depth than your Ah Ma’s silent judgment. Why do humans not just suffer, but also spiral into deep thoughts about suffering? Is this a grace, or just another form of divine trolling? Matt and Dan chew over how pain forces us to ask life’s big, messy questions — like char kway teow: greasy, satisfying, but maybe a little too real at 2am. And here's the kicker - suffering, when seen through Christ, isn’t just a pit of despair; it becomes part of our salvation. So, grab a plate, bring your chilli oil, and join these two Awkward Asian Theologians as they sweat through the divine mystery of pain - one existential noodle strand at a time. Resources: John Paul II: Salvifici Doloris

    25 min
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Ratings & Reviews

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out of 5
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About

Awkward Asian Theologians is the audio project of AwkwardAsianTheologian.com, and is a collaboration between Matthew Tan (Dean of Studies at Vianney College Seminary in the Diocese of Wagga Wagga) and Daniel Ang (Director of the Archdiocese of Sydney's Centre for Evangelisation). Each fortnight, the podcast brings academic theology to lived life as seen through the eyes of two Australian Catholic laymen, and doing so asianly.

Information

  • Creator
    Matthew Tan and Daniel Ang
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    25
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Matthew Tan and Daniel Ang
  • Show Website
    Awkward Asian Theologians

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