The church father Tertullian’s question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” has long challenged theologians to interrogate the relationship between theology (Jerusalem) and Western philosophy (Athens). By reframing the question to, “What has Jerusalem to do with Beijing?” the theologian K. K. Yeo frames Asia as the primary context for doing theology rather than the West.

When I first arrived in Los Angeles in 1981 to do my Master of Divinity program at the School of Theology at Claremont, I was full of dreams to learn from this “Brave New World”.

My students call me a Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. scholar; I published two books and wrote a number of articles on Dr. King, and am currently serving as co-chair of the Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. Unit at the American Academy of Religion, the largest guild of religious scholars in the world.

Our kitchen is filled with all manner of children’s supplies. Sippy cups, plastic cutlery, and a half dozen small, white plastic bowls with blue or pink rims. We fill them up with cereal and pretzels, fruit and popcorn; basically, anything edible.

Back in India, some of my cousins’ children call me aunty. Actually, they call me mamima or kakima, depending on whether I’m their father’s cousin or their mother’s cousin.

I am pleased by this invitation from Inheritance magazine to reflect on the concepts that were powerful for me in understanding my identity as an API Christian. I begin by doing a riff on the prevalent stereotype of APIs as “model minorities”.

Theological reflection is an ordered inquiry into an individual or corporate experience in conversation with the wisdom of religious and cultural traditions. It produces a conceptual framework that leads to action.

I had heard the story a thousand times. As a young man in China in the 1920s, my Gung-Gung (grandfather) Calvin Chao contracted the deadly disease of tuberculosis.

I live a small life. I teach, live alone, sing in choir, and commit Sunday evenings to family. My body, as it were, disappears into convention. But it is in the details that things get complicated: I teach religion at a Catholic all-boys’ school.

Theologian Amos Yong remarked that African Americans have a theology of liberation, and Latinx have a theology of the borderlands. He suggested that Asian Americans have a theology of exile, because of our status as forever foreigners wherever we are.

About five years ago, I published “The Future of Evangelical Theology: Soundings from the Asian American Diaspora” (IVP Academic, 2014). I was motivated in that book by the observation that the so-called center of gravity for Christianity had shifted from the Euro-American West to the global South (Asia, Africa, and Latin America).

When I came to the United States for higher education, I was a practicing Hindu and a seeker. Discipled by my Hindu mother, I followed and believed in the teachings of Hinduism without any concern until I was in high school. It was during my high school years that I encountered the Freedom Fighters who served alongside Gandhi to win liberation for India from the British.

From one perspective, my life has been like the Oscar-winning movie, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”. Like Benjamin Button, my path in ministry went in reverse. I started as a theological educator and engaged academia for 12 years. Then I became a pastor.

I burst through the door of a low, light-green stucco cottage and scream, “They have taken my mother! The Communists have kidnapped her and are brainwashing her!” This nightmare began to interrupt my childhood sleep after my family moved from Okinawa to Kansas. I was 6 at the time.

This year marks the centenary of the March 1st Movement of Korean protest against Japanese colonialism. Thirty-three religious leaders, among them 16 Christians, issued a Korean Declaration of Independence that sparked a nationwide protest. About 2 million people took part in the protests, and thousands were killed and injured.

The API (Asian/Pacific Islander) Caucus at Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York has a ritual during important events to recite their group’s genealogy, an adaptation of the Matthean genealogy. It honors the activists, spiritual leaders, and alumni who shaped them, and includes API students who have walked the halls of Union into their ancestors’ legacy.

Exactly 50 years ago, the identity “Asian American” was seized as a call to action, to resistance against oppression and solidarity with Third World liberation movements. Today, it is almost only a census label. Fifty years ago, the world was in upheaval, with the civil rights movement, Third World revolutions, and decolonization.

I don’t read dystopias. Not until now, that is. It might be because dystopias can be too grim or too cynical. I’ve heard from way too many people that after the election, they’ve foregone reading dystopian novels because it is just too real. And it’s true; there is already too much death around us.

Rachel Held Evans (1981-2019) would have had just the right words for a time like this. Her death is doubly cruel in robbing us of one of our foremost poet-theologians, one who could gaze into deep voids and tremendous griefs and from them craft creeds that could breathe for us when we could not. Rachel exuded an incredible influence on contemporary Christian belief and practice.

A few months ago, I became Asian American. Demographically speaking, that is. I received a green card to Trump’s U.S. From Malaysia, I landed at JFK airport in New York City in late 2018, having left it when it was Obama’s U.S. in 2016. Back then, you needed finer theoretical tools like postcolonialism to pull back the curtain on U.S. empire and critical race theory to pick apart layers of oppression.

When asked by a reporter in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre: “Do you see, today, white nationalism as a rising threat around the world?” Donald Trump responded: “I don’t, really."

Director Barry Jenkins’ film, “If Beale Street Could Talk” (2018), stays faithful to the central theme of love in James Baldwin’s original novel while adding Jenkins’ own voice.

“Stories we tell” is a fascinating documentary about the filmmaker Sarah Polley’s mother and their family. As different siblings, relatives, and family friends are interviewed and their stories interweave, the viewer begins to see different facets of a deeply complex person.

I left my Korean church eight years ago. It was my third departure in 11 years, but this was different. This time, I didn’t walk through a revolving door into another Korean church. I walked away from church altogether.

A long time ago, the first chancellor of post-war Germany, Konrad Adenauer, joined a TV interview where a journalist asked him the following question: “You were often called ‘The Great Simplifier of Politics’.