Deadly Viper: Kung Fu, Asian Stereotypes, & Racial Reconciliation

Not sure if you’ve seen some of the dialogue happening around this issue, but here’s a quick summary of what the whole ruckus is about.

Zondervan Publishing and the authors Mike Foster & Jud White have a book out, since 2007, called, “Deadly Viper Character Assassins: A Kung-Fu Survival Guide for Life & Leadership”. It’s essentially a book on character building and integrity keeping for Christian leaders, which no one doubts the contents of. But what’s caused a stir is their marketing and apparent exploitation of Asian stereotypes.

Brought to the forefront by Dr. Soong Chan Rah (North Park Theological Seminary), the issue surrounding Deadly Viper’s misuse of Asian stereotypes is alarming. Catch up with the conversation by reading this interaction between Dr. Rah and one of the authors of the book, this open letter to Zondervan & the authors, and this response by Mike & Jud.

I just thought I’d share a few quick thoughts on all this.

some caveats: I don’t know Mike or Jud personally, so please don’t take my remarks as lambasting them and their character. I realize Mike & Jud’s marketing of the book was all in good intention and I scarcely see how they were being racist or are racist. I also recognize that Mike & Jud are brothers in Christ, who share a passion to develop godly Christian leaders.

My surprise with this whole issue is the seeming unawareness of both the authors, Zondervan, and many of the book’s readership. How could anyone overlook the blatant racially charged stereotype of Asians for nearly 2 years since publishing the book? How did it get overlooked for so long? Did it have to take an Asian to point out the obvious flaws? Are we so blind to issues of racial stereotyping? I thought not, but this makes me rethink. I mean, do we really need “Kung-Fu Fighting” as intro music (click on Deadly Viper at Catalyst) to anything remotely Asian? Do we need images like this one to promote a Christian leadership book?

Do we really need random Kanji characters to authenticate our Kung-Fu theme? Don’t we realize that Kanji is a Japanese use of Chinese characters and that Kung-Fu is a Chinese martial art? I wonder how different this would all be if it was a book on character with pictures and themes depicting Native-American Stereotypes, or maybe more poignantly, African-American stereotypes?

It all just confuses me and mostly saddens me. I thought the people of God, the multi-ethnic multitude, were to love and encourage one another, not exploit and sell each other out. It saddens me that in 2009, we deal with issues like this, where there was no obvious malicious intent, but still a lack of awareness of different cultures and peoples. I know we’re all works in progress, especially me, but I hope that we can all work toward a respectful unity that exemplifies the Body of Christ and its beauty in diversity.

Twitter: The World’s Stage

Can Twitter become a tool for global conversation or is it just a sounding board for one’s own thoughts?

I think it has the potential for the former, but is realistically the latter.

I recently de-followed John Mayer. I love the guy’s music, but the dude just tweets ridiculousness and does it often. His Friday night shenanigans are of no interest to me. Now that’s a trite example, but in the same manner, do we not dwindle down our lists of people we follow by how much their message fits into our narrow perspectives? Do we not follow people just because they say what we want to hear (i.e. celebrity gossip)? Or ought we to use this sort of medium to increase our awareness of the global voice? voices outside our own kingdoms.

I’m not too sure I do a good job of this, but beginning to think this is a perfect tool to hear & maintain a global conversation. Maybe it’s not, but how can we redeem this medium of technology?

Relationships: Real or Virtually Real?

Mate debate: Is monogamy realistic? – CNN.com.

Take a minute to read this incredibly eye-opening, yet completely unsurprisingly article by CNN.

While we can look at numerous factors that might lead to the complete disintegration of the monogamous relationship, I thought of one particular one that really intrigued me. In the article, a French author, Jaques Attali, writes this about the declining state of monogamy, “Monogamy, which is really no more than a useful social convention, will not survive. It has rarely been honored in practice; soon, it will vanish even as an ideal.” Then we have suggestions from authors like Judith Eve Lipton & David Barash who wrote the book, “The Myth of Monogamy”, suggesting a serial monogamy as an alternative to the traditional mode of monogamy. Not only that, but there seems to be a dating website now called, “The Ashley Madison Agency”, a dating site for married men and women, which claims 4.5 million members and greets visitors with the motto, “Life is short. Have an affair.”

Then it hit me… Monogamy is disintegrating because it is quite literally vanishing. We have no real point of contact in relationships anymore with the onset of social media giants like facebook & twitter, and the proliferation of portable devices hooking you into these mirage-like relational medias has only perpetuated the problem. Could the unrealistic state of monogamy be due to the virtual reality we’ve planted ourselves in? We no longer have real friends, but facebook friends. We no longer have real conversations, but g-chats. We no longer see one another, because we’re too busy looking at our iphone and checking on the twitter update of the friend you happen to be in the same room with. With the disintegration of the reality of relationship, no wonder we’ve lost any reality of the monogamous marriage relationship. Husbands and wives, individually tied to their blackberrys, no longer communicating, because it’s easier to send an email, when convenient.

Yes, we can very well attribute the breakdown of the monogamous relationship with a declining moral ethic, a loss of the reality of God, a confused sexual ethic, the increased consumer mentality, and many more contributors. But let’s just sit on this one for a bit. How real are your current relationships? And for the married folk, when’s the last time you sat and talked, done relationship the old-fashioned way?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for social media and technological advances that aid our communication. But as one of my professors rightly points out, “With the addition of every new advancement in technology, we very well lose something real”. Everything is virtual – virtually invisible. The lines of reality and virtual reality are being blurred by the minute. And I don’t think it to be a stretch to see a world one day like we see in the prophetic movie, Wall-E.

Come down from the high clouds and blurry fogs of virtual reality and ground yourself in the reality of God’s very Word. We’ve extrapolated and abstracted everything and everyone to the point where nothing really exists anymore. But when we return to the ground of God’s Word, we root ourselves in a timeless truth that instructs us that a monogamous relationship is the design for humanity.

Justification: What is it?

Justification is an incredibly weighty doctrine in Christianity. It determines our standing before God, and considering we’re sinful to our core, we place our hope on this doctrine of Justification. In recent years, two prominent Christian thinkers, John Piper & N.T. Wright, have engaged in a debate through a myriad of books and articles, in hopes to clarify and lay bear the weightiness of the Doctrine of Justification.

Here is a quick PDF article from Christianity Today explaining what the debate is about.

For Whose Sake?

“Save me for the sake of your steadfast love” Psalm 6:4

Would not this sentence be more appropriate if it read, “Save me for my own sake“? It seems odd to me that David, the psalm writer, would ask God to save him, for the sake of God’s steadfast love. In other words, how does David’s saving lead to a lifting up of God’s steadfast love?

It seems that for some reason, the saving of David leads to a magnifying of God’s steadfast love. I think precisely because God’s love is magnified when God gives to David what is ultimately best for him and that is God. So when God saves David, he saves David to Himself, giving David the greatest thing he could ever want or desire.

As somewhat of an aside, I was at a conference last night at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, featuring some top notch thinkers of the Evangelical Faith. At the conference, echoing statements made by both Dr. Jack Davis of GCTS, and Dr. Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity, struck me. They echoed similarly that the Church lacked the concrete reality of God in its life. Meaning, the Church has lost any sense of who God really is and that He is the ultimate reality, more real than the chair we comfortably sit in as we listen to our favorite preacher. Volf proposed that the only way to combat the increasingly sensational thirst & desire of our present age, or what he terms, ‘The Empire of Desire’, “we need to make plausible that the love of God is the key to human flourishing (or satisfaction).” All this to say, David’s salvation is for the sake of God’s steadfast love, because it shows that God saves David, not only to give him more of the earthly things he desires, but he saves David to give him more of God, who is the ultimate reality and, as Volf might say, the only hope for human flourishing.

More Joy

“You have put more joy in my heart

than they have when their grain and wine abound.”

Psalm 4:7

How true. Joy that this world may never know. But incredible how my heart longs for their grain and wine.

Your joy is joy.

Totally Like Whatever, You Know?

This is such a poignant poem written by Taylor Mali, who has an incredible insight into an emerging culture and language in our day. I first heard it through a sermon Mark Dever gave at Capitol Hill Baptist Church.

In case you hadn’t noticed, it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you’re talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you’re saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)’s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren’t, like, questions? You know?

Declarative sentences – so-called
because they used to, like, DECLARE things to be true
as opposed to other things which were, like, not -
have been infected by a totally hip
and tragically cool interrogative tone? You know?
Like, don’t think I’m uncool just because I’ve noticed this;
this is just like the word on the street, you know?
It’s like what I’ve heard?
I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions, okay?
I’m just inviting you to join me in my uncertainty?

What has happened to our conviction?
Where are the limbs out on which we once walked?
Have they been, like, chopped down
with the rest of the rain forest?
Or do we have, like, nothing to say?
Has society become so, like, totally . . .
I mean absolutely . . . You know?
That we’ve just gotten to the point where it’s just, like . . .
whatever!

And so actually our disarticulation . . . ness
is just a clever sort of . . . thing
to disguise the fact that we’ve become
the most aggressively inarticulate generation
to come along since . . .
you know, a long, long time ago!

I entreat you, I implore you, I exhort you,
I challenge you: To speak with conviction.
To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks
the determination with which you believe it.
Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker,
it is not enough these days to simply QUESTION AUTHORITY. You have to speak with it, too.

Reset.

I loved Nintendo, because of the reset button. I’d be on level 9 of Super Mario Brothers soaring through the stage on my last life, when one of those huge bullets would catch me out of nowhere! So instead of facing the fact that I’m gonna have to start all over again, I quickly nudge the “reset” button. perfect. let’s try this again…

Life’s restarting again in so many ways. There’s always a freshness about the new school year that allows you to feel like you’ve just hit “reset”. perfect. let’s try this again…

Jesus, I need you.

Wedding Pics

just got back a sample of our wedding pics!

if you’re looking for a photographer for your wedding or event, you GOTTA look up Wayne. He’s so sick it hurts… check out his work!

Wayne Yuan Photography

here are some of my favorites

I had to sport the Jordan’s! it wouldn’t be me without ‘em. Retro Jordan Jumpman Pros!

The Entourage. This is how we roll. Reality TV, not HBO.

and my favorite. SO hardcore.

Augustine’s Confessions

who writes like this anymore? wow.

“Be not foolish, O my soul, and do not let the tumult of your vanity deafen the ear of your heart. Be attentive. The Word itself calls you to return, and with him is a place of unperturbed rest, where love is not forsaken unless it first forsakes. Behold, these things pass away that others may come to be in their place. Thus even this lowest level of unity may be made complete in all its parts. “But do I ever pass away?” asks the Word of God. Fix your habitation in him. O my soul, commit whatsoever you have to him. For at long last you are now becoming tired of deceit. Commit to truth whatever you have received from the truth, and you will lose nothing. What is decayed will flourish again; your diseases will be healed; your perishable parts shall be reshaped and renovated and made whole again in you. And these perishable things will not carry you with them down to where they go when they perish, but shall stand and abide, and you with them, before God, who abides and continues forever.” St. Augustine’s Confessions IV.xi.16