Jonathan Tran
Biographic Data
| ID | 5715900 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Tran |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Tran |
| SIGNATURE | TRAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Baylor University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2866-2378 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Difficulties of Atonement and Difficulties of Reality
Speaking For Myself, and Other Banalities in advance
This essay offers an account of traditioned theological speech where speaking necessarily comes with the entailments and constraints of speaking for and being spoken for. It contrastively portrays critiques of tradition qua tradition as confused, where the confusion unfurls in endless critique—where nothing escapes, including traditions of liberation—resulting in banalities at the heart of Christian ethics
Grieving an End We Created
The following takes a “learning to die” approach to the climate crisis, offering a thought experiment to examine the ideas, insights, and possibilities that arrive once we approach the environmental catastrophe as a scenario where humans grieve an end they created. The article draws from discourses across the humanities and employs scenes and concepts from literature, social science, agroecology, philosophy, and Christian theology in order to sur…
Looking Up and Looking Out
This essay reads W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and Óscar Romero’s third pastoral letter, The Church and Popular Political Organizations, as offering a liberation-driven and Gospel-minded account of coalitional solidarity. After tracing Du Bois’s analysis of the “public and psychological wage” of racial capitalism and its divide-and-conquer strategy, the authors turn to how democracy for Du Bois involves a double maneuver of looking up f…
The Antiracist Culture War and Its Disconnects
In the following, I relate recent work I’ve done on Asian Americans and Asian American Christianity to a political phenomenon I refer to as the “antiracist culture war.” While I foreground description and analysis of the culture war, the precarious presence of Asian Americans informs the article throughout, becoming explicit in its second half. From the precarity of their position, one can see how the culture war works and the fate it bestows to …
The Workplace and Psychosocial Experiences of Australian Senior Doctors during the Covid-19 Pandemic
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had significant mental health impacts among healthcare workers (HCWs), related to resource scarcity, risky work environments, and poor supports. Understanding the unique challenges experienced by senior doctors and identifying strategies for support will assist doctors facing such crises into the future. A cross-sectional, national, online survey was conducted during the second wave of the Aust…
Only Humans Get Dehumanized
Jonathan Tran’s Response to John Bowlin
Cora Diamond’s Theological Imagination
Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism
Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism contrasts two approaches to antiracist theory and practice. The first emphasizes racial identity to the exclusion of political economy. This approach’s prevalence, in the academy and beyond, now rises to the level of established doctrine. The second approach views racial identity as the function of a particular political economy—what is called racial capitalism—and therefore analytically subordi…
(Post)Critical Political Theology and the Uses and Misuses of Whiteness Discourse
In this essay, I advance a theological account of critique that attends to the material nature of creaturely life. This account involves first the “postcritique” movement recently taken up by literary theorists. In order to demonstrate what postcritique involves for political theology, I enlist Luke Bretherton’s anti-Manichean theological method and its case for ethnography. I then turn to an extended example. Specifically, I ask about the useful…
The Making of Stanley Hauerwas
Assessing the Augustinian Democrats
In this essay I argue that Christian political participation as envisioned by those I term “Augustinian democrats”—a group of Protestant ethicists following a path cleared by Jeffrey Stout’s 2004 Democracy and Tradition —is founded upon an elegantly rendered political ontology, but leaves incomplete a description of the practical task and place of the church. My contention is that this incompletely developed practical task is not accidental to th…
Moral Innovation and Ambiguity in Asian American Christianity
“The Parable of the Shrewd Manager” in Luke 16 illuminates some important features of Asian American life. Like the parable’s central character, Asian Americans live under a set of cultural expectations where success is achieved by accepting terms set by others. In America, those terms are often defined racially, where access gets indexed to one’s ethnicity, or to perceptions of one’s ethnicity. The terms can be of great benefit and can come at g…
Linguistic Theology
The Christian Imagination
The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory
Introducing Asian American Theologians – By Jonathan Y. Tan
INTRODUCING ASIAN AMERICAN THEOLOGIANS . By Jonathan Y. Tan . Maryknoll : Orbis , 2008 . Pp xiv + 210 . $24.00 . Jonathan Tan's lucid introduction serves as a primer on all things Asian-American-Christian (e.g., a chapter on Asian immigration with histories of Chinese, Japanese, Korean immigrations; summaries of Asian-American theologies and theologians; a nice bevy of statistical tables, etc.). While all this makes Tan's book useful, its finest …
Race
RACE: A THEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS . By J. Kameron Carter . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2008 . Pp . xiv + 489 . $35.00 . This is an amazing book: in scope, scholarship, audacity, and significance. Carter takes on no less than the entire Western philosophical, political and theological tradition in offering a Christian analysis of race, religion, and their critically bodied intersections. Painstakingly unfolding a thesis as simple as it is breath…
Rethinking Christ and Culture
The Vietnam War as Theo-Drama
This paper analyzes the Vietnam War through the lens of Hans urs von Balthasar's "theological-drama." According to Balthasar, the unfolding of God's eternal self-giving illumines creaturely temporality as desperate when turned inward, no longer desiring its eternal fulfillment but rather idolatrously grasping its own immanent meaning. By contrasting Balthasar's portrayal of divine kenosis with American foreign policy and its "domino theory" view …
Moral Innovation and Ambiguity in Asian American Christianity
“The Parable of the Shrewd Manager” in Luke 16 illuminates some important features of Asian American life. Like the parable’s central character, Asian Americans live under a set of cultural expectations where success is achieved by accepting terms set by others. In America, those terms are often defined racially, where access gets indexed to one’s ethnicity, or to perceptions of one’s ethnicity. The terms can be of great benefit and can come at g…
Rethinking Christ and Culture
The Vietnam War as Theo-Drama
This paper analyzes the Vietnam War through the lens of Hans urs von Balthasar's "theological-drama." According to Balthasar, the unfolding of God's eternal self-giving illumines creaturely temporality as desperate when turned inward, no longer desiring its eternal fulfillment but rather idolatrously grasping its own immanent meaning. By contrasting Balthasar's portrayal of divine kenosis with American foreign policy and its "domino theory" view …
Introducing Asian American Theologians – By Jonathan Y. Tan
INTRODUCING ASIAN AMERICAN THEOLOGIANS . By Jonathan Y. Tan . Maryknoll : Orbis , 2008 . Pp xiv + 210 . $24.00 . Jonathan Tan's lucid introduction serves as a primer on all things Asian-American-Christian (e.g., a chapter on Asian immigration with histories of Chinese, Japanese, Korean immigrations; summaries of Asian-American theologies and theologians; a nice bevy of statistical tables, etc.). While all this makes Tan's book useful, its finest …
Race
RACE: A THEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS . By J. Kameron Carter . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2008 . Pp . xiv + 489 . $35.00 . This is an amazing book: in scope, scholarship, audacity, and significance. Carter takes on no less than the entire Western philosophical, political and theological tradition in offering a Christian analysis of race, religion, and their critically bodied intersections. Painstakingly unfolding a thesis as simple as it is breath…
The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory
The Christian Imagination
Linguistic Theology
Assessing the Augustinian Democrats
In this essay I argue that Christian political participation as envisioned by those I term “Augustinian democrats”—a group of Protestant ethicists following a path cleared by Jeffrey Stout’s 2004 Democracy and Tradition —is founded upon an elegantly rendered political ontology, but leaves incomplete a description of the practical task and place of the church. My contention is that this incompletely developed practical task is not accidental to th…
Moral Innovation and Ambiguity in Asian American Christianity
“The Parable of the Shrewd Manager” in Luke 16 illuminates some important features of Asian American life. Like the parable’s central character, Asian Americans live under a set of cultural expectations where success is achieved by accepting terms set by others. In America, those terms are often defined racially, where access gets indexed to one’s ethnicity, or to perceptions of one’s ethnicity. The terms can be of great benefit and can come at g…
The Making of Stanley Hauerwas
Only Humans Get Dehumanized
Jonathan Tran’s Response to John Bowlin
Cora Diamond’s Theological Imagination
Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism
Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism contrasts two approaches to antiracist theory and practice. The first emphasizes racial identity to the exclusion of political economy. This approach’s prevalence, in the academy and beyond, now rises to the level of established doctrine. The second approach views racial identity as the function of a particular political economy—what is called racial capitalism—and therefore analytically subordi…
(Post)Critical Political Theology and the Uses and Misuses of Whiteness Discourse
In this essay, I advance a theological account of critique that attends to the material nature of creaturely life. This account involves first the “postcritique” movement recently taken up by literary theorists. In order to demonstrate what postcritique involves for political theology, I enlist Luke Bretherton’s anti-Manichean theological method and its case for ethnography. I then turn to an extended example. Specifically, I ask about the useful…
The Workplace and Psychosocial Experiences of Australian Senior Doctors during the Covid-19 Pandemic
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had significant mental health impacts among healthcare workers (HCWs), related to resource scarcity, risky work environments, and poor supports. Understanding the unique challenges experienced by senior doctors and identifying strategies for support will assist doctors facing such crises into the future. A cross-sectional, national, online survey was conducted during the second wave of the Aust…
The Antiracist Culture War and Its Disconnects
In the following, I relate recent work I’ve done on Asian Americans and Asian American Christianity to a political phenomenon I refer to as the “antiracist culture war.” While I foreground description and analysis of the culture war, the precarious presence of Asian Americans informs the article throughout, becoming explicit in its second half. From the precarity of their position, one can see how the culture war works and the fate it bestows to …
Looking Up and Looking Out
This essay reads W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and Óscar Romero’s third pastoral letter, The Church and Popular Political Organizations, as offering a liberation-driven and Gospel-minded account of coalitional solidarity. After tracing Du Bois’s analysis of the “public and psychological wage” of racial capitalism and its divide-and-conquer strategy, the authors turn to how democracy for Du Bois involves a double maneuver of looking up f…
Speaking For Myself, and Other Banalities in advance
This essay offers an account of traditioned theological speech where speaking necessarily comes with the entailments and constraints of speaking for and being spoken for. It contrastively portrays critiques of tradition qua tradition as confused, where the confusion unfurls in endless critique—where nothing escapes, including traditions of liberation—resulting in banalities at the heart of Christian ethics
Grieving an End We Created
The following takes a “learning to die” approach to the climate crisis, offering a thought experiment to examine the ideas, insights, and possibilities that arrive once we approach the environmental catastrophe as a scenario where humans grieve an end they created. The article draws from discourses across the humanities and employs scenes and concepts from literature, social science, agroecology, philosophy, and Christian theology in order to sur…
Difficulties of Atonement and Difficulties of Reality
Philosophy (14 works) · Political science (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Theology (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · History (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works)