I am taking a break from Vietnamese Marianism to return to the ethnic press in the U.S. While looking at a Catholic periodical, I found a one-page report on Vietnamese refugees in Alaska. This issue is from 1977, and the article isn’t about Catholicism but labor in Alaska. It is valuable because there is a paucity of information about the refugees in Alaska.
The Vietnamese Catholic ethnic press reported widely on this congress but there is hardly anything in English. I am appreciative of Fr. Linh Hoang, OFM (Siena College), who attended the event and filed the write-up below along with the photos.
Continue reading “The 2019 biennial congress of Vietnamese priests in the U.S.”
Last year I submitted an article on Vietnamese Marianism to a journal based in Asia, and the submission received split decisions from the anonymous reviewers. The comments, especially from the reviewer who found it problematic, were quite good. I am not an intellectual sadist or a glutton for punishment. But I’ll admit to feeling certain gladness when receiving a more critical or negative feedback from anonymous reviewers, including this one.
Click here to read or download the first article–and here for the second article.
- “Ultramontanism, Nationalism, and the Fall of Saigon: Historicizing the Vietnamese American Catholic Experience,” American Catholic Studies (Spring 2019): 1-36.
- “The Resettlement of Vietnamese Refugee Religious, Priests, and Seminarians in the United States, 1975–1977,” U.S. Catholic Historian 37.3 (Summer 2019): 99-122.
Continue reading “My two articles on Vietnamese Catholic refugees”

Continue reading “Marianism during decolonization in Indochina”
In order of discussion:
- Balázs Szalontai, “The ‘Sole Legal Government of Vietnam’: The Bao Dai Factor and Soviet Attitudes toward Vietnam, 1947–1950,” Journal of Cold War Studies 20:3 (2018): 3–56.
- Phi-Vân Nguyen, “A Secular State for a Religious Nation: The Republic of Vietnam and Religious Nationalism, 1946–1963,” Journal of Asian Studies 77:3 (2018): 741–771.
- Olga Dror, “Education and Politics in Wartime: School Systems in North and South Vietnam, 1965–1975,” Journal of Cold War Studies 20: 3 (2018): 57–113.
- John C. Schafer, “Ngô Kha, Vietnam’s Civil Wars, and the Need for Forgiveness.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 13:1 (2018): 1–41.
- Duy Lap Nguyen, “Sovereignty, Surveillance, and Spectacle in South Vietnamese Spy Fiction,” positions: east asia cultures critique 26:1 (2018): 111–150.
Continue reading “Five recent articles on the Vietnam Conflict”
I am getting to the last volume of a Catholic periodical from South Vietnam, and it includes news items about a three-and-a-half-week training on translating the Bible. It was held during Mach 1974 in Dalat and at the Alliance Evangelical Center (Trung Tâm Tin Lành Alliance), commonly known as the Villa Alliance at the time.
Continue reading “Catholic-Protestant relations in South Vietnam: competition to collaboration?”