The Sense of Something

Something happens—be it good or bad, a changing mix of both.
It unfolds right now, and it will happen again tomorrow.
My purpose is not to prevent it, though I may tend to what is preventable.
Opportunities bloom everywhere, just as misfortune remains ubiquitous.
In all of this happening, what really matters is now.

We must perceive this now inside, outside, and far beyond us.
Always, remain mindful of that presence there and respond to it, or simply watch it with a quiet, calm eye.
To feel the true sense of being alive means keeping this awareness of something.

Interesting Videos about Justice and Transformation

My Scholarly Journey: Justice, Mercy, and Transformation

What does it truly mean to live a life of transformation? After two decades of research, teaching, and writing, I’ve come to realize that the core of meaningful change lies in a single, complex concept: Justice.

In this video, I share my personal journey as a scholar and a follower of Jesus, exploring how the "Good News" is inextricably linked to God’s righteousness. We will dive deep into the ten different facets of justice—from distributive and social to environmental and restorative—and look at how the subversive parables of Jesus challenge our normative thinking about fairness, work, and even the "weeds" within ourselves.

If you have ever asked "What is God?", "What am I?", or "What is the right thing to do?", I invite you to join me in this reflection on the value of today and the ongoing process of transformation.
 

Hannah's Transformative Journey (1 Sam 1:1-2:11)

I want to share a unique perspective on a well-known biblical narrative: the story of Hannah from the first book of Samuel.

The ideas I am sharing today are based on my research published in 2008 in the journal The Bible and Critical Theory, titled "The Story of Hannah (1 Sam 1:1–2:11) from a Perspective of Han: The Three-Phase Transformative Process."

In biblical scholarship, we often read Hannah’s story through spiritual, feminist, or liberation lenses. While these are valuable, they can sometimes fall into the trap of "identity politics"—a rigid "us versus them" mentality that can inadvertently exclude others. In my work, I propose an 'intercultural' reading. By using the Korean concept of Han, we can see Hannah’s experience not just as a personal struggle for a child, but as a three-phase process of holistic transformation that involves the self, the community, and society at large.

The One Rule That Unites the World: Jesus, Hillel, and Confucius
Is there a single truth that transcends time, geography, and culture? In this video, we explore the "Golden Thread" of human ethics—a principle discovered independently by the greatest minds of the East and West. From the teachings of Jesus on the Mount to Rabbi Hillel’s famous challenge while standing on one leg, and Confucius’s profound concept of reciprocity (Shù), we discover a shared moral compass. Join us as we break down these ancient texts to see how empathy and the "Golden Rule" serve as the foundation for human civilization. It turns out that despite our differences, we have always been guided by the same simple truth.

People Over Pillars: Reclaiming Human Agency from Ancient Wisdom
Do we exist to serve the system, or does the system exist to serve us? In a modern world filled with rigid rules and faceless institutions, it’s easy to feel like a cog in a machine. This video dives into a revolutionary "Human-Centered" philosophy shared by Jesus and Confucius. We examine Jesus’s radical claim that the Sabbath—a sacred divine institution—was made for the benefit of humankind, not the other way around. We then look at Confucius’s empowering insight that "The Way" (the Dao) only becomes great through the people who walk it. This video is a reminder that you are the subject of your life, not an object of the rules.

Rethinking the "Body of Christ"

In this short video, Dr. Yung Suk Kim — author of the debut book Christ’s Body in Corinth: The Politics of a Metaphor — offers a fresh reading of Paul’s "body of Christ" language as a Christic formation: a community shaped by Christ’s faithfulness rather than merely an organizational unity. Watch to learn why the traditional organism model can enforce conformity, what a Christ-like (Christic) community looks like in practice, and three concrete steps congregations can take to prioritize the vulnerable.

The Illusion of Identity: Why Your Labels Don't Define You

Who are you, really? Is your identity just a collection of labels—your job, your ethnicity, or your citizenship—or is it something deeper? In this video, Dr. Yung Suk Kim explores the "Illusion of Identity." Drawing from his unique life journey—from a businessman representing a Korean company in Panama and Miami to becoming a U.S. citizen and a Professor of New Testament—Dr. Kim challenges the way we categorize ourselves and others. In this video, we discuss: The Limit of Labels: Why terms like "Korean American" only explain a small fraction of who a person is. Identity as Construction: Why you must be the architect of your own identity rather than letting society "label" you. The "Second Career" Perspective: How moving from the business world to biblical scholarship reshaped Dr. Kim’s understanding of the self. Beyond Identity Politics: Acknowledging the commonalities we share while honoring the vast differences in how we view justice, life, and purpose. "I often tell my students: 'Don't judge me based on what you know about me. I am more than what you describe.' This applies to all of us. We are all more than the boxes the world tries to put us in."

Newtonian Mechanics and Criticisms

The core of Newtonian mechanics is the predictability of a deterministic universe governed by universal laws of motion and gravitation, where time and space are absolute.

At its foundation are four fundamental pillars formulated by Isaac Newton in his 1687 work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy):

The Three Laws of Motion
These laws describe how forces affect the movement of physical objects:

• The Law of Inertia (First Law): An object will remain at rest or move at a constant speed in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force.
• The Law of Acceleration (F=ma) (Second Law): The acceleration of an object depends directly on the net force acting upon it and inversely on its mass.
• The Law of Action and Reaction (Third Law): For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Forces always occur in matched pairs.

The Universal Law of Gravitation
Newton unified earthly and cosmic physics by demonstrating that the same force causing an apple to fall from a tree also keeps the moon in orbit around the Earth. Every mass exerts an attractive gravitational force on every other mass, proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. 

Absolute Space and Time
In the Newtonian worldview, space and time are rigid, unchanging frameworks:

• Time flows uniformly across the entire universe, completely independent of any observer or external influence.
• Space is an infinite, three-dimensional "stage" or container that remains completely stationary and unaffected by the matter within it.

Determinism and the "Clockwork Universe"
Conceptually, the core of Newtonian mechanics is deeply tied to determinism. If you know the exact position, mass, and velocity of every object in a closed system at one precise moment, Newton’s equations allow you to calculate their exact positions and movements at any point in the past or the future. This gave rise to the philosophical metaphor of a "clockwork universe"—a grand, predictable machine operating under fixed mathematical laws.

Criticisms

However, the primary criticism against Newtonian mechanics is that it describes a localized, macroscopic approximation of reality rather than the fundamental nature of the universe. Both Albert Einstein (via Relativity) and the founders of Quantum Mechanics demonstrated that Newton's foundational pillars collapse at extreme scales—specifically at the speed of light and at the subatomic level.

The core criticisms from both perspectives reveal major limitations in the Newtonian worldview:

Albert Einstein’s Criticisms (Relativity)
Einstein challenged Newton’s fundamental assumptions about space, time, and gravity, proving that they are not absolute frameworks.

   The Illusion of Absolute Time and Space: Newton assumed time ticks at the same rate everywhere. Einstein proved that time and space are relative and intertwined into a four-dimensional fabric called spacetime. Time slows down (time dilation) and space contracts depending on an observer's speed and proximity to a gravitational mass.

   The Flaw of "Action-at-a-Distance": Newton’s law of gravitation suggested that gravity acts instantaneously across empty space. Einstein criticized this because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. He replaced it with General Relativity, showing that gravity is not an invisible pulling force, but the structural warping of spacetime by mass and energy.

   The Variable Nature of Mass: In Newtonian physics, mass is a fixed, unchanging quantity (F=ma). Einstein’s Special Relativity demonstrated that as an object approaches the speed of light, its relativistic mass changes, showing that mass and energy are interchangeable (E=mc2).

Quantum Mechanics’ Criticisms
Quantum mechanics dismantled the deterministic, predictable machine of the Newtonian "clockwork universe" when applied to the micro-world.

   The Breakdown of Strict Determinism: Newtonian mechanics states that if you know an object's initial position and velocity, you can perfectly predict its future. Quantum mechanics proves this is fundamentally impossible at the atomic scale. Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle establishes that you cannot simultaneously know both the precise position and momentum of a subatomic particle.

   The Replacement of Certainty with Probability: While Newton's world is governed by precise, predictable trajectories, the quantum world is governed by statistical probabilities. Particles do not occupy a single fixed "groove" or path; instead, they exist in a cloud of potential states (superposition) described by a wave function until an observation forces a specific outcome.

   Discontinuity vs. Continuity: Newtonian physics views energy and motion as continuous changes. Quantum mechanics showed that energy transitions occur in discrete, indivisible packets called quanta.

Superposition and Entanglement

Graphic summary of superposition and entanglement (AI-generated)

Quantum Mechanics and Hermeneutics

Toward a Quantum Hermeneutic: 

Reconceptualizing Textual Meaning through Superposition and Entanglement

Yung Suk Kim, PhD

In a classical understanding of art, a line drawn in ink stays exactly where it was placed, singular and defined. But imagine dropping multiple watercolors onto wet paper—the pigments bleed, blend, and create new, unpredictable hues depending on how the water flows. For centuries, traditional textual hermeneutics operated on the ink-line premise: a text was treated as a static object containing a fixed, extractable payload of meaning, put there by an author and waiting for a passive scholar to uncover it. However, anyone who has spent years wrestling with complex, multi-layered literary or sacred texts knows that meaning behaves much more like blending watercolors.

When we apply the core principles of quantum mechanics—specifically superposition and entanglement—not as mere stylistic metaphors, but as a conceptual framework for critical interpretation, we witness a profound transformation: hermeneutics shifts from a static extraction of frozen facts to a dynamic, relational field event.

The Text in Superposition: Preserving the Uncollapsed State

In quantum mechanics, superposition dictates that before a measurement occurs, a physical system exists in a combination of all its possible states simultaneously. Think of a spinning coin: while it is in motion, it is neither exclusively heads nor tails, but a blur of both possibilities at once. It is only when the coin is slapped down onto a table that it is forced to resolve into a single state.

Before an interpreter opens a book, the text rests in a similar state of hermeneutical superposition. It is a cloud of semantic potentiality. Its historical contexts, narrative motifs, structural tensions, and lexical ranges exist concurrently:

• Polyvalence as State, Not Error: In a classical model, conflicting readings of a single passage are often viewed as a problem to be solved—one must be right and the others wrong. In a quantum model, those readings represent different co-existing vectors within the text's total wave function.
• The Horizon of Potentiality: The unread text is not an empty vacuum; it is everything it can validly be within its textual parameters.
• The primary task of critical scholarship is not to rush to flatten this complexity, but to map the full cloud of potentiality before an interpretive choice is made.

The Act of Reading as Measurement: Collapsing the Wave Function

If the unread text sits in superposition, what happens when we read it? In physics, introducing a measuring apparatus forces a wave function to collapse into a single, concrete outcome. In hermeneutics, the reader acts as the measuring apparatus. When an unread text, resting in a superposition of possible meanings, interacts with a reader's specific methodological lens, an act of measurement occurs. This critical reading forces the cloud of semantic possibilities to collapse into a single, realized reading.

An interpreter never approaches a text from a neutral vacuum. We bring specific cognitive structures, socio-historical locations, and methodological lenses—whether historical-critical, narrative, structural, or psychological. The moment we ask a specific question of the text, we "measure" it, causing its cloud of semantic possibilities to collapse into one articulated reading for that specific instance.

Hermeneutical Entanglement: Bypassing Spatiotemporal Separation

If superposition describes the internal potential of the text before reading, entanglement describes the non-local relationality between texts, contexts, and the interpreter during reading.

In quantum mechanics, two entangled particles share a unified state such that measuring one instantaneously conditions the state of the other, regardless of distance. In critical interpretation, entanglement manifests across three key dimensions:

• The Reader-Text System: Subject and object cannot be neatly separated. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s "fusion of horizons" reflects this reality: the outcome of reading is a property of the entangled system (Reader + Text), rather than an isolated attribute of the text alone.
• Correlated Canonical Intertextuality: When texts within a canon or literary tradition share a dense network of symbols, motifs, or theological themes, they become hermeneutically entangled. Resolving or "flipping the spin" of a key motif in one passage instantaneously reconfigures the probability amplitudes of paired motifs across the entire corpus, regardless of the historical years separating their composition.
• The Non-Locality of Symbol and Mind: Entanglement bypasses temporal estrangement. An ancient symbol produced thousands of years ago and a contemporary mind evaluating it today entangle during the interpretive event. The modern context measures the ancient text, while the ancient symbol simultaneously structures modern consciousness.

Moving Beyond Newtonian Hermeneutics

Synthesizing these quantum principles provides a unified matrix for understanding the interaction between text and mind. In this framework, the unread text begins in a state of superposition, holding a cloud of multi-layered semantic potential simultaneously. When the reading event occurs, entanglement takes over, as the reader's cognitive and methodological framework inextricably intertwines with the text to form a single, unified system. The moment an articulated meaning is reached, we witness a wave function collapse: formulating a specific interpretive question forces the text's superposition to settle into one concrete outcome. Finally, across broader intertextual networks, non-local correlation ensures that determining the reading of one textual node instantly shifts the interpretive spin across related texts, no matter the historical distance between them.

Viewing interpretation through this lens shifts the goal of the critical scholar. The objective is no longer merely to extract a single collapsed reading and claim it as the exclusive truth, but to master the art of mapping the text's full superposition—all while remaining acutely aware of how our own entangled lenses shape the reality that emerges.

Discover a Radical Vision of Justice

How can we rethink and relive the parables of Jesus today in times of chaos or injustice?
Explore Justice and the Parables of Jesus: Interpreting the Gospel Stories through Political Philosophy (T&T Clark, 2026).

Step into the socio-political world of first-century Palestine and discover how Jesus’s stories directly confronted the power and structures of the Roman Empire. This compelling volume examines the parables through the lens of political philosophy, tackling the ultimate ethical question: “What is the right thing to do?”

Organized by theme, each chapter offers a deep dive into the moral complexity of these timeless narratives, complete with discussion questions designed to spark critical dialogue and reflection. Whether you are a scholar, a student, or a thoughtful reader looking to connect ancient text with modern life, this book provides a powerful framework to help us understand—and live out—the ethical and political implications of Jesus's teachings today.

Soma Christou (Body of Christ)

My lifelong scholarship on Paul's body metaphor culminates in the following. This is an argument I first made two decades ago, and it still resonates deeply with me.

Paul argues that the followers of Jesus must be united with Christ in such a way that they share his faith and spirit. Therefore, they must live like Christ; they are a Christic body. This is Christ-united living. Paul’s idea does not stem from Stoicism, which uses the body metaphor to support hierarchical unity. His concept of being “one in Christ” is not that of concord in the empire; rather, it is an ethical union with Christ. The empire’s model and Paul’s vision are thus fundamentally disparate. I therefore argue that Paul’s point is never about being merely Christ-centered or Christ-unified, but about being Christ-united or Christ-embodying.

*For more about this scholarship of mine regarding the body of Christ, see 1) Christ's Body in Corinth; 2) How to Read Paul, and 3) A Theological Introduction to Paul's Letters.

New book projects

These book projects are in progress. I don't mean that I'm writing all of them at the same time, but rather that they are all currently on my plate.

 

도덕경 명상집

성서학자가 번역하고 묵상하는

도덕경 명상집

어떻게 살아야 할 것인가를 깨우쳐주는 살아 있는 고전

성서학자의 눈으로 고전을 읽으며 교감하는 책

다시 읽는 도덕경: 성서학자의 비평과 묵상

동양과 서양, 고대와 현대의 경계에서 읽는 노자

도덕경 명상집 (Google e-book ) | Read online (free)

성경공부: 에수의 비유편

이 책은 예수의 비유를 역사와 문학 비평적으로 접근함과 동시에 현재의 삶의 정황을 동시에 다룬다. 비유는 예수의 가르침의 중요한 수단으로 당대의 문제점을 꼬집고 도전하는 이야기이다. 그것은 단순히 개인의 구원을 다루는 것이 아니다. 비유를 잘 이해하기위해서 그 당시 세계의 정치, 경제, 사회지식이 요구된다. 또, 비유해석의 다양한 방법론도 필요하다. 결국은 비유를 통하여 오늘을 재조명하는 것이 목적이다. 이 책은 새로운 성경공부용으로 개발되었다.

본인이 쓴 학구적인 책으로는 영어로 된 책 2권이 있다. 한권은 개론용에 해당한다: Jesus’ s Truth: Life in Parables. 다른 한권은 정의와 비유의 접점을 다루는 책이다: Justice and the Parables of Jesus: Interpreting the Gospel Stories through Political Philosophy.

성경공부: 비유편 (paperback) | Read online (free)