Lucas Kwong is a writer, musician, assistant professor of English at New York City College of Technology, and assistant editor for New American Notes Online. You can sign up for his newsletter at eschatontwist.substack.com. His writing can be found at outlets such as The Revealer and the Institute of Christian Socialism’s The Bias Magazine, scholarly journals like Victorian Literature and Culture and Journal of Narrative Theory. He is also the author of an open letter on anti-Asian racism and Christian nationalism, which you can read and sign here: www.againstchristianxenophobia.com. Follow him on Twitter @xenoseimi.
Posts By This Author
In Praise of Calvin's Total Depravity
We can’t defeat racism by “being good” or “feeling guilty.”
Photo of John Calvin via rook76 / Shutterstock.com. Illustration by Mitchell Atencio.
As a post-evangelical, I have no interest in rehabilitating Calvin’s ideas about double predestination or his justification for the execution of Michael Servetus. Nonetheless, I’m unwilling to cast Calvin and his theological legacy in exclusively negative terms; I believe that confronting racial injustice today actually requires recuperating Calvin’s infamous doctrine of “total depravity,” or a spiritual condition staining humanity from birth. Doing so can help us better understand why both progressive and reactionary heirs to Calvinist thought fall short — and how we might work to transform our fallen world instead.
Christian Opponents of CRT Peddle a Hollow Salvation
I’ve grown weary of even engaging such attacks on CRT, so lacking are they in intellectual and moral integrity. Never mind that CRT is primarily a legal theory of how U.S. law has and should address racial discrimination, not a program of salvation; never mind that Greenway’s reading of the BFM would prohibit Southern Baptists from voting, speaking at municipal town halls, or engaging in any civic duty that does not literally and explicitly involve evangelism; never mind that critical race theorists, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Robin D.G. Kelley, propose means for overcoming the very “division, guilt and blame” that is supposedly celebrated by CRT proponents. Efforts to convince those so clearly immune to facts are rarely successful.
It's Not Enough to Condemn Hate
Jami Webb places flowers outside Young's Asian Massage following the deadly shootings in Acworth, Ga., March 19, 2021. Webb is the daughter of Xiaojie Tan, the owner of the spa who was killed in the shootings. REUTERS/Bita Honarvar
In the wake of the atrocities of March 16, Asians in the U.S. are beginning to mobilize en masse against the hatred directed at our community.