Love is the Illumination

The Future of Asian American Theology, Part One (The Skeptical Recital)

Jan 30, 2026

By Dr. Jonathan Cat Tran, Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School

Editor’s note: This two-part essay is a revised and expanded version of remarks made at the ANARCS panel discussion on the “Future of Asian American Theology” at the American Academy of Religion conference in Boston, MA on November 22, 2025.

I taught Asian American theology for the first time this semester, and my sense was dual, two things at once.

First: a profound appreciation for the first generation of Asian American theology: the academic, institutional, and organizational tasks that have been carried out beautifully. The work has been profound and incredibly moving, and my students have found ways home in a lot of your works.

Second: the other sense I had, profoundly, is how that season has passed. The valences and voices now require a new research trajectory in Asian American theology.

Most Asian American books proceed with what I call the Asian American Theological Skeptical Recital. It spends about three-quarters of its time handwringing about our double presence between Asia and America; our double presence as racists and victims of racism; our double place in culture. It majors in concepts of hybridity, liminality, and other ways of saying we are neither here nor there. And it spends a lot of time talking about what Rey Chow calls “ethnic abjection,”[1] and what she, I think, properly describes as the kind of vanity and idleness of that work, given the various structures we try to diagnose.

At the end of this recital—the skeptical recital about how rough the world is if you are Asian American (again, which seems to be quite accurate)—there is usually a move to something like solidarity: “Well, we do not know our own stuff, but maybe we can be with those people over there.” As if the end of the recital is just further skepticism about one’s own place in the world.

This work was, again, incredibly important, and in its day and season it did tremendous work. And that work has been done, and having been done, is now done.

Now, some might object and insist we continue the recital, remain in that season, and they might do so with very clear practical considerations in mind: the money is in the recital. There is money, resources, and recognition insofar as we Asian Americans continue playing out the caricatures. It’s all there, and likely only there, in perpetually playing out these tropes. I want to acknowledge the validity of these considerations, but I want us to recognize that this is part of the problem. It will keep us here, as it has for four or five decades.

I am not saying that this kind of circulation of the recital does not generate incredibly important discourses. I am saying we have done those things. And so this is a moment for us to look in the mirror and ask: what do we want? Because it seems like two kinds of problems proceed if we go and follow the money.

One: we will rehearse and re-enliven and reinvigorate the very caricatures we are trying to get out of, tropes and caricatures that might have served a purpose for a time, but have now served their purpose and no longer serve us in the same way. They have outlived their usefulness.

Two: we will close ourselves off to other routes of thinking and imagining and living and being. It’s not simply that the discourse that characterized the first season doesn’t work anymore, it is that insisting on them will block new routes for Asian American thinking; and not only routes to new thinking, but it will also block our ability to see that a new season has come, that the old has outlived its usefulness, and that there are new possibilities in front of us.

This year, after twenty years, I have returned to Duke University. It is a vastly different place. It looks like an Asian university. I do not know that the discourses I was reared on—these discourses I’m describing as belonging in a prior season—properly describe an elite university where 60 to 70 percent of the students in the top programs are Asian. Maybe that means that we are playing out the same stereotypes, and they need to be re-interrogated again. Perhaps. But I want us to consider: are there other routes into thinking about such things?

This transition from one season to another, as we move from one path to another, can be broadcast generally to the humanities. We taught generations of students in the humanities to unmask everything. We taught them that everything they hold near and dear—whether it be Shakespeare or their families or their churches—should be cause for suspicion. Many of the humanities disciplines—post-critical theory, or post-critique—are now in the process of rethinking those lessons among literary scholars wanting to make important distinctions between critique and criticism, and are attempting to work out a new posture: How do you be attuned to the world? How do you love it? How do I properly critique it without changing my fundamental posture of suspicion and critique?

Imagine this scenario: let’s say a research university realized that short of some commitment to virtue and character formation, they would be turning themselves into finishing schools for professional certification in tech or finance or the medical industrial complex. And let’s say that university were to then turn to its divinity school to help with that thinking--that the divinity school knew something about and had something to contribute on these questions of virtue and character. Now imagine if the divinity school responded by saying, “Well, we used to teach that stuff, but now we’ve unmasked it as pure power and patriarchy, so we can’t give you what you’re asking—that is, what we used to do—but can give you some pretty good critique and suspicion. We could give you the skeptical recital on all things to be suspicious about, to be double-minded about, to wring our hands about.” This would be an absurdity—and a wasted opportunity.

One of the things theology can give the world is an ontological story of why the attunement that universities and the humanities so desperately want is natural to us—why love is a basic creatureliness, or as I have written, why justice and mercy are natural to the world because they are natural to God. That is not something secular literary theory is going to give us, but that is something Christian theology can offer, and perhaps an inadvertent reason secular universities keep us around. But what if Christian theology abandons that task because our only mode is critique itself? What if, rather than worship, we offer skeptical recital? And so whether it is the critique of whiteness against Asia, or Asian participation in whiteness and injustice—again, the skeptical recital is a profound position of mind—we need to both name the problems but name them within a much larger story of what it is we want, and what it is we offer the world. Critique and skepticism are important, but they cannot be the only thing we do, and I am suggesting that Asian American academia feels stuck in that mode, in that it doesn’t work as much as we think and that it blocks off other routes of thought.

If you want a better picture of what has become the critical humanities in the university, then, think about how the sciences often work. The cellular biologist who spends her days in her lab, studying cellular mitosis—she is in love with it. She believes its natural categories. She probably has not taken post-critical or deconstructive theory coursework on why she is incorporated with big pharma and the medical industrial complex and all these kinds of things. But there is a kind of basic love there, an orientation to one’s discipline, a deep attentiveness to the world. My suspicion is that students are drawn to that—not because it cashes out way better than getting a job as an English major (there is that, too)—but also because there is a kind of innocence and beauty there. People would rather give their lives to that than to become professional critics of the very things they and the people they love hold near and dear.

And so, I want to inaugurate a new movement—a new moment—in Asian American theology, and it is this moment that transitions us from critique, handwringing, and doubleness to attunement and love, not in some sentimental sense, but in habits of mind that orient and open one to the world, and all the ways loving the world is always on the way to loving God.

[1] Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002), 128-152.

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