Kwok ’n’ Roll

In this July 4th special, U.S. Army veteran, former attorney, and Villanova theologian Byron Wratee shares his journey from a small South Carolina town to the battlefields of Afghanistan — and what he learned about faith, citizenship, and the America worth believing in.

He traces his family's military service back to the Civil War. He recounts the peacebuilding work that doesn't make headlines: building schools, caring for communities, ensuring Afghan girls could go to school. And he asks the question no one wants to answer on Independence Day: what does the Fourth of July mean to the Black soldier who served it?

This conversation covers:

• Growing up in South Carolina — the first state to secede

• Serving as a medic in Afghanistan and the Muslim interpreter who changed his life 

Why he left a seven-year law practice to study theology

• The Red Summer of 1919 — when Black WWI veterans returned home to race riots and lynchings

• Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited and the roots of nonviolent resistance

• Catholic social teaching, human dignity, and American exceptionalism

• A closing spiritual — "Plenty Good Room"

Dr. Byron Wratee teaches Christian ethics at Villanova University. His research centers on Howard Thurman, the Black prophetic tradition, and the theological dimensions of anti-Black violence.

🔗 Join the conversation on my Substack: https://kwokpuilan.substack.com

Most people who talk about AI and theology have read about AI. Alexander Chow actually studied it — he holds a degree in computer science and spent a decade as a software engineer before becoming a theologian.

Last week, he launched the Oxford Handbook of Digital Theology — the most comprehensive academic reference on this field ever assembled. I wanted to know: what does someone who has stood on both sides of that divide actually see?

In this conversation, we explore:

• What happens when AI changes the code you wrote — and what that means for human creativity

• Why Chinese Christians navigate AI and surveillance differently than Western theologians

• How Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism offer a radically different anthropology for AI ethics

• Why the Pope's encyclical on AI is valuable but too human-centric — missing what Alexander calls "magnifica divinitas"

• What theology will look like in 50 years if we keep treating technology as a tool rather than a theological question

Alexander Chow is a theologian based at the University of Edinburgh, co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Theology (Oxford University Press, 2025), and a scholar of Chinese Christianity.

📌 Episode 2 of the AI & Religion series — exploring what faith traditions across the globe bring to the conversation about artificial intelligence.

The Pope issued a sweeping warning about artificial intelligence — but what does it actually say, and was he right? In this first episode of the AI & Theology series, I sit down with Dr. Tracy Trothen, professor of ethics at Queen's University, Canada, to unpack the Vatican's intervention, the rise of grief bots, and what AI means for how we make meaning, face death, and define what it means to be human.

🎙️ AI & THEOLOGY — Episode 1

📖 Topics: Pope Francis's AI encyclical, grief bots and digital afterlife, transhumanism, biohacking, Catholic social teaching, marginalized voices in AI governance.

Tracy J. Trothen and Randall Reed, Understanding Religion and Artificial Intelligence

What does it mean to practice erotic justice in a time of political crisis? Christian social ethicist Marvin M. Ellison joins Faithful Provocations to explore the intersection of faith, sexuality, and public life — from his upbringing in the American South wrestling with his family's history in slavery, to his critical work on same-sex marriage activism, to what his congregation in Maine has done to protect immigrants from ICE raids.

In this conversation, Marvin reflects on Augustine's theology of hope, what White Christians must reckon with in the MAGA era, and why "erotic justice" — the title of his book — remains an urgent framework for faithful living today.

📚 Erotic Justice by Marvin Ellison

Can you search for life on Mars — and still believe in God? 

An Episcopal priest and NASA astrobiologist, Pamela Conrad spent years working on rover missions designed to look for signs of life on Mars. In this conversation with Kwok Pui Lan, she makes the case that faith and science are not enemies — they are two different lenses pointed at the same reality.

Topics covered:

Why curiosity is at the heart of both science and faith

What the Mars rover missions revealed about life — and about creation

Why the US-China moon race is a colonial problem, not a scientific one

How to read Genesis without reading it literally — and what a medieval rabbi says about it

How her book A Believer's Journey Through the Stars is structured around sound, light, and time

Why "darkness" and "blackness" are not the same thing — and its implications for race

Why she prefers "we ARE creation" over "creation care"

The Society of Ordained Scientists and its mission in an age of disinformation

📖 A Believer's Journey Through the Stars by Pamela G. Conrad