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

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

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