Article: Celebrities as role models: Is it time to be worried?

Celebrities as role models: Is it time to be worried? 

Note: This is an older article, I figured it would be nice to keep as part of my link archive to the POC

Celebrities are what they are because they are well-known. What they do can certainly help that – after all, you wouldn’t be famous if you were just a normal person with a normal job. No, you’d have to be a musician, an actor, or even a pop-culture scientist.

And that’s where the disconnection begins. Because even if they are famous for what they do, does it necessarily mean they have amazing attributes that should be emulated?

Read the whole article at The Philippine Online Chronicles. Click here for more articles I wrote for the POC.

Article: VIP ako! – The feeling of entitlement in the Philippines

VIP ako! – The feeling of entitlement in the Philippines

For the older generations, there has always been that familiar gripe: “when I was your age, we never had it so good.” That’s usually a reaction to how the younger generations take things for granted, or, looking at it another way, don’t give things the proper value.

However, what is being noticed now is how so many are crossing the line from “taking things for granted” and sliding right into “I deserve this” territory. And yes, that’s how entitlement looks like from the outsider’s point of view.

Is this epidemic of entitlement becoming worse, or is it just that people are pointing it out more?

Read the whole article in The Philippine Online Chronicles. Click here for more articles I wrote for the POC.

Article: Santo Nino: What Child is this?

Santo Nino: What Child is this?

Philippine folk Catholicism may have many faces and practices, but one of the most intriguing is our veneration of the Sto. Niño, the Infant Jesus. It is also even more interesting that the Feast of the Sto. Niño comes so close after the Black Nazarene, as if they are bookends of the same font of faith that drives the Filipino psyche. But why have we come to worship Jesus as a child? Why do we do it with so much zeal and abandon?

Read the rest of this article at the Philippine Online Chronicles. Click here for more of my articles for the POC.

*original photo taken by Pinoy916, for the Wikipedia article.

Article: Pinoy Folk Catholicism - The Black Nazarene

Pinoy Folk Catholicism - The Black Nazarene

My housemate, unexpectedly, once asked me: would you like to go and see the procession of the Black Nazarene? It was an awkward question to answer at best, since I had no particular liking to be in crowds, and I wasn’t a religious person either. But now that the procession has come around again, and given how the Philippines has been in some sort of calamity bull’s eye the past year, perhaps the procession of the Black Nazarene, for all of its chaos and strangeness to outsiders looking in, is necessary for the Filipino psyche.

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However, there is a dark side to this celebration of survival, and it is in the concept of trading for the protection of the Black Nazarene. It is a psychological quid pro quo with God. All will be forgiven and all will be healed with the sacrifice and suffering that the procession sometimes brings.

How many times have we heard of people who sacrifice so much for the procession, and yet spend the rest of the year as if nothing has happened? How many people start worshipping the statue’s “special properties” without thinking of the entity it represents?

This, too, is very Filipino, the idea that you can bargain with God. Some people point to the mistaken notion of indulgences that were given out by the Catholic Church in the past, while others point to a deeper tradition of communicating with ancient deities. Whatever the case may be, the modern-day application has been one where a person could technically “equal” the scales for their sins by sacrifice and devotion.

Read more at the Philippine Online Chronicle

*Original photo by Constantine Agustin, as per Wikipedia.