Here, you’ll find a collection of writings on Christian faith, a fairly personal yet very important part of my life. I won’t put everything here; most of my religious writing goes into my personal journal and notes. I also do not pretend to be a great authority on matters of the Christian religion or its relation to the public sphere; if it is penetrating insights you are after, you will probably be better served elsewhere. It is merely my hope that a small portion of my musings might be edifying in some way to someone else at some point, which is why I’m making some of my writings public.
Note that most of these posts are explicitly written for myself, in order to hash out my own thoughts on some topic. This has several implications for how they’re written: for instance, I tend to assume exactly the amount of background knowledge that I possess; I make liberal use of abbreviations;1 and the things that I spend the most time emphasizing are not necessarily the most important, but rather the most confusing to me.
The items on this page are necessarily different from most of the other writing I do. There are two kinds of writings here: brief musings (which are more or less like all the other kinds of posts on this website) and long-form essays. Because I think that such essays benefit greatly from footnotes and margin notes (and some nice typesetting), I have typeset them in LaTeX and published the finished PDFs. Also, my thoughts will almost certainly evolve, which is why I’ve marked every post with its date of latest publication.
Perhaps you want to know a little bit about my background. I was raised in a fairly typical Chinese immigrant church2: nondenominational (but somewhat baptistic in theology) and culturally somewhat conservative, though not in all the same ways as mainstream evangelicalism. I attended a similar church3 in college and was a student leader in their campus ministry group (ACF). Now I’ve graduated college and attend the First Baptist Church in the City of New York in, well, New York City. To adapt a bit from Chris Krycho, I consider myself a Christian in the Reformed tradition, but strive always to be orthodox, catholic, and irenic.
And, just to satisfy the classicist in me, occasional use of untranslated Latin…↩︎
The Monmouth Chinese Christian Church in Middletown, NJ, which later changed its name to the Monmouth Community Christian Church.↩︎
The Pittsburgh Chinese Church, which did become noticeably more Reformed over my years there after the hiring of a new pastor during my freshman year.↩︎