Barbara Krensavage insists that clams are not a regular part of her diet. Yet one snowy evening in December she found herself craving an old recipe and so brought home four dozen quahogs—a clam particularly abundant along the Eastern shores of the United States, between Cape Cod and New Jersey. Mr. Krensavage was in the midst of shucking the shellfish for dinner when he discovered one that looked like it was dead. It had a different color to it and he thought it was diseased. As he was about to discard it, Mrs. Krensavage took a closer look.

It wasn’t dead. In fact, inside the live clam was a rare, possibly priceless, purple pearl. Experts estimate that roughly one in two million quahog clams contains a gem-quality pearl like the one found by the Krensavages. Due to the great rarity of the find, it has been difficult to even place a value on it, though some have estimated the pearl to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The life and ministry of Jesus Christ unveiled something new to the world. Jesus spoke of a kingdom, where, like this discovery of the Krensavages, all is not as it may first appear. In a world that would seem to some more marked by disease than promise, he spoke of a treasure hidden, a mystery revealed in this life, worth selling all we have to possess as our own. Even amid the promise and sting of death and disease, he spoke of an abundant life somehow stronger than death itself. He spoke of his kingdom as present and real. He called it a pearl of great price: For the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.(1) Yet he noted that even holding it, we might completely miss its worth.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Transfigured →

There is a vacuum at the heart of our culture. As Saul Bellow argued in his 1976 Noble Laureate lecture, “The intelligent public is waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, and social theory and what it cannot hear from pure science: a broader, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. If writers do not come into the center, it will not be because the center is pre-empted; it is not.” Very simply stated, there is no center to hold things together. Or to put it differently, there is no over-arching imagination, no over-arching story to life by which all the particulars can be interpreted. The pursuit of knowledge without knowing who we are or why we exist, combined with a war on our imaginations by our entertainment industry, leaves us at the mercy of power with no center. May I illustrate this?

On many different occasions while driving and listening to music, every now and then a piece comes on that I find either unmusical or jarring. I usually shut the radio off. But then one day I was taken to see a play called The Phantom of the Opera. Suddenly I realized that some of the music I had not quite enjoyed was from this play. I was amazed at the difference knowing the story made, whenever I heard the music subsequently. In fact the music in some portions is utterly magnificent. The love songs, the discourses, yes, even the arguments made sense when you know the story. Life needs a story for one to understand the details. Life needs to hold together at the center if we are to reach to distant horizons. But our culture owns neither a story, nor holds at the center.

If such is the reality of our culture, where does that leave us? The challenge, as I see it, is this: Will we connect with a generation that hears with its eyes and thinks with its feelings?

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Crux of the Story →

We are all wired differently, aren’t we? Some of us are the intellectual types and some emotional, some are action-driven and so on. In my pursuit of God, I confess I am inclined to loving with all my mind and it doesn’t seem to demand much laboring. It’s rather effortless for the most part. I’m quite pleased with myself here: a specialist-of-sorts, in loving God with my intellect, I am!

But Jesus doesn’t leave his request in this one dimension. The greatest commandment he says is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.(1) This unsettles me. It seems to recommend, rather command, that I love with all my heart and my soul and my strength, and not just specialize in loving him with my mind. For the life of me, and increasingly so, loving God with my emotions doesn’t seem to be my forte. This emotional frigidity bothers me more so, when I spot others who are able to effortlessly love the Lord with their emotions. In order to not despair over this malady, I keep indulging in that pursuit of God that flows for me effortlessly, unlabored—totally ignoring the command to love him with my emotions, will, and energies as well. A wholesome, well-rounded, robust love for God with one’s entire being, rather than a unidimensional, fragmented, stunted expression of intimacy, it appears, is what we should yearn to grow towards eventually.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Methods or Messiah →

It is a task performed with repetitive motion, often in the heat of the day for hours and hours. It is carried out despite its monotonous nature, regardless of the blisters that form on delicate skin or the pain that engulfs an aching back, hands, and knees. It is a task done in the hope of preventing encroaching chaos and destruction. It is a time-consuming, never ending, and back-breaking task demanding me to perform it over and over again. It is weeding my garden!

When I first began clearing weeds from my garden, I had a zeal that carried me through all of the physical weariness and the mental monotony of this repetitive task. Often taking up an entire day during the weekend or hours after work, I would weed tirelessly until all I saw was the freshly cleaned soil and beautiful, flourishing plants once choked by weeds. Sadly, it seemed that no sooner had I cleared the garden bed that weeds resurged relentless in their attack. As I focused on one particular section of yard, another section would be ambushed. I am easily overwhelmed by the reality that my labor merely delays the advance of weeds; they come back year after year no matter how far down I dig or how many of their spreading rhizomes I unearth. My stamina to continue to nurture my plants and combat the weeds wanes with each summer season.

Of course, I am ashamed at my flabby determination. How silly this would seem to those whose endurance has been tested in the fires of life-and-death situations, those who have been asked to survive in the most crushing circumstances? I read about endurance-athletes who run, swim, or climb for miles. I wonder about this kind of tenacity as I muster my comparatively small quantum of energy for the more quotidian task of caring for my garden. And I wonder about the quality of a person who undertakes endurance sports or who has survived and thrived despite incredible, life-threatening odds.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Endurance →

On October 30, 1938 a national radio program playing dance music was interrupted with a special news bulletin. The announcer heralded news of a massive meteor, which had crashed near Princeton, New Jersey. The reporter urged evacuation of the city as he anxiously described the unfolding scene: Strange creatures were emerging from the meteor armed with deadly rays and poisonous gases.

The infamous broadcast, which caused panic throughout the country and mayhem all over New York and New Jersey, was made by Orson Welles, a 23-year old actor giving a dramatic presentation of the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds. His compelling performance created traffic jams and tied up phone lines, interrupted religious services and altered bus routes. Several times in the program a statement was made regarding the broadcast’s fictional nature. Still, many Americans were convinced that Martians had really landed. One man insisted he had heard the President Roosevelt’s voice over the radio advising all citizens to leave their cities. Another, on the phone with a patrolman, cried in alarm, “I heard it on the radio. Then I went to the roof and I could see the smoke from the bombs, drifting over toward New York. What shall I do?”(1)

The War of the Worlds broadcast will perhaps forever remain one of the most telling examples of the power of context, and in more ways than one. Whether listeners tuned in after the introduction or happened to miss the declaimers, the convincing portrayal was enough to send waves of fear across the entire country. In the context of breaking news, fiction appeared alarmingly factual.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – In-Breaking News →

Middlemarch is the epic novel by Mary Anne Evans, better known by her male penname George Eliot. The work is considered one of the most significant novels of the Victorian period and a masterpiece of English fiction. Rather than following a grand hero, Eliot explores a number of themes in a series of interlocking narratives, telling the stories of ordinary characters intertwined in the intricate details of life and community. Eliot’s focus is the ordinary, and in fact her lament—in the form of 700 pages of detail—is that we not only so often fail to see it, but fail to see that there is really no such thing. There is neither ordinary human pain nor ordinary human living. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” she writes, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”(1)

The world Eliot saw around her is not unlike our own in its capacity to silence the dissonance of details, the frequency of pain, the roar of life in its most minute and yet extraordinary forms. We silence the wild roar of the ordinary and divert our attention to magnitudes more willing to fit into our control. The largest tasks and decisions are given more credence, the biggest lives and events of history most studied and admired, and the greatest powers and influences feared or revered most. And on the contrary, the ordinary acts we undermine, the most common and chronic angst we manage to mask, and the most simple and monotonous events we silence or stop seeing altogether. But have we judged correctly?

Artists often work at pulling back the curtain on these places we have wadded out of sight and sound, showing glimpses of life easily missed, pulling off the disguises that hide sad or mortal wounds, drawing our attention to all that is deemed mundane and obscure. Their subject is often the ordinary, but it is for the sake of the extraordinary, even the holy. Nowhere does Eliot articulate this more clearly than in her defense of the ordinary scenes depicted in early Dutch painting. “Do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish those old women scrapping carrots with their work-worn hands….It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and flame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes.”(2) For the artist, ordinary life, ordinary hardship, ordinary sorrow is precisely the scene of our need for God, and remarkably, the scene of God and miracle.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Scene of Miracle →

Starting with a question seems like a good idea to most people: it helps to bring a sharper focus, it’s conversational, it reveals gaps in knowledge, and it’s quite natural.(1) Kids seem to use questions instinctively to find out about the world. Of course, there are lazy questions and there are thoughtful questions. The difference is hard to explain, but anyone who has ever heard or asked a great question, asked at the right time, will immediately know why good, careful, thoughtful questions are always worth asking.

When it comes to questions about faith, Christians have often pointed to the example of God asking Adam and Eve, “Where are you?” and the way in which Jesus interacts with people in the New Testament.(2) Here are just a few of the questions of Jesus:

What are you looking for? What do you want me to do for you? Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me? If you love only those who love you, what credit is that to you? Do you want to be well? Do you see this woman? What good is it to gain the whole world but forfeit your soul? Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Who is greater, the one seated at the table, or the one who serves? Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? Which of you would hand his son a stone when he asks for a loaf of bread, or a snake when he asks for a fish? How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God? Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God? Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ but do not do what I command? Why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For which of these good works are you trying to stone me? Do you think that I cannot call upon my Father and he will not provide me at this moment with more than twelve legions of angels? Would you like some breakfast? Have you come to believe because you have seen me? I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? Do you love me?

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Starting With a Question →

Nicodemus was confused. He had come to Jesus under the secrecy of the night professing what he thought he knew: “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.”(1) Nicodemus was a Pharisee in the time of Jesus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He was highly regarded, which most likely explains the veil of night by which he sought to meet the controversial rabbi. He did not want to draw unnecessary attention to his consideration of Jesus. Even so, it was perhaps an act of faith to seek out the divisive young man from Galilee, an act of humility to grapple with a message that thoroughly confused him, a message that seemed to call the very basis of his faith into question.

In reply to Nicodemus’s admission that night, Jesus offered one of his own: “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” The ensuing conversation is one of mystery and semantics.

“How can a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb.”

Again Jesus answered curiously, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Imagination Reborn →

I do not know of many races or sporting competitions in which the last person across the finish line comes in first place. Certainly, getting the lowest time often means the winning performance. But to come in last place means to come in last. For all of us who were picked last for various athletic events in school, how whimsical it would have been if being chosen last was a position of honor! Of course, I could very easily see how unfair it would seem if those with the best athletic ability, those who had trained the longest, worked the hardest, and had come in first place did not receive the honor due that effort. The last being first can be very bad or very good depending upon where one stands.

Jesus once told a story that upends expectations for those who perennially find themselves as last or first. A landowner hires laborers to work in his vineyard. They are hired throughout the work day and all the workers agree to the wage of a denarius for a day’s work. The enigmatic and exceptional punch line to this story occurs when those who are hired at the very end of the day—in the last hour—are paid the same wage as those who worked all day long. The long-suffering laborers cry out, “These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day.” Those workers that were hired first are not paid any additional wage. The first are not first, in this story. Instead, the landowner replies with a radical reversal: The last shall be first, and the first last.

Not only is the conclusion to this story exceptional and enigmatic, it also seems wholly unfair. For how could those who worked so little be paid the full day’s wage? Yet, this upending of any sense of fairness is a recurring theme in other stories of Jesus as well. Indeed, the familiar parable of the prodigal son functions in a similar manner and upsets our sense of what is fair and right, just as in the parable of the laborers. A careful reading presents an extravagant display of grace towards all wayward sons and daughters, even as it illuminates a human frugality with grace.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Upending Fair →

The well-read collection of essays written by C.S. Lewis and compiled posthumously in the book God in the Dock was originally published in England under a different title. The book was titled Undeceptions.

“Undeception” was the word Lewis used to describe a startling experience of awareness—moments when deception is uncovered and the cause is seen clearly from within, moments when blind spots are replaced with reality. He was taken with these awakenings or undeceptions in many of the characters of Jane Austen. In much of Austen’s work, he observes, “[T]he undeception…is the very pivot or watershed of the story.”(1)

Lewis would unquestionably state the same of our own stories. “Undeception” was no doubt a word that fittingly described his startling experience of being brought into the kingdom of God kicking and screaming, making him “the most reluctant convert in all England.” It was this experience through which he saw himself, the world, and its creator for the rest of his life.

Encountering God, many have noted the recognizing of blind spots. “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it” woke Jacob to his own deception. He didn’t wake up declaring that the God who was once absent had now appeared. He said, “God was here all along and I was the one who didn’t see it.” Some have referred to pivotal encounters like Jacob’s dream as “thin spots”—moments in life where the nearness of God is nearly palpable. Other theologians describe such encounters as openings or baptisms, windows or transcendence. Still others give testimonies similar to the man born blind in ancient Jerusalem. Forced to explain to the Pharisees the unexplainable moment he had with Jesus, he mustered the only words he could think to describe it: “Only one thing I do know. I was blind but now I see.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Undeceptions →

In his famed “I have a Dream speech,” Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed: “We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” At these words, Dr. King painted for a troubled nation a powerful image of hope, and forever rooted the civil rights movement in images of justice and the image of God.

The images presented in the book of Daniel are similarly rooted in images of justice and God. In fact, it is for this reason that the sixth chapter of Daniel was a favorite Scripture passage among civil rights preachers in the early 1960s. The story told in Daniel 6 presents a king who loses sight of his purpose as king and the purpose of the law, creating a system void of justice and a law that only hinders and traps its makers. But against the images of lawlessness and corruption, the story portrays a silent but active Daniel clinging to a higher law, bowing before the King of Kings in the midst of persecution, in the hands of his oppressors, and the shadows of the lions’ den. Living within the hopelessness of exile, sweltering under the heat of injustice, Daniel unflinchingly declares the sovereignty of God, and with faithfulness and perseverance refuses to believe otherwise.

In a kingdom in which he was a mere foreigner, Daniel was appointed a position of great authority because the king found him to be useful. The story quickly hints that in the peaceful dominion of King Darius all is not peaceful. The leaders serving under Daniel want to get rid of him. The story does not provide a thorough explanation for their hatred of Daniel and yet, perhaps in this silence much is said. The nature of any prejudice is absent of explanation. Without reason, without logic, we discriminate and are discriminated against. There is no explanation because to explain our reasons behind prejudice is to become our own judge. In fact, Daniel’s enemies announce their illogic when they conclude, “We will never find any basis for charges against this man Daniel unless it has something to do with the law of his God” (6:5).

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Bank of Justice →

Milton! thou shouldest be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

Oh! raise us up, return to us again:

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic free,

So didst thou travel on life’s common way,

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

This was the cry of William Wordsworth early in the nineteenth century as he saw the demise of English culture underway. The Church, the state, the home, the writers and shapers of society were called to task, for the nation had lost its soul and was hurtling headlong towards moral defacement. “Milton!” he cried, “England hath need of thee.” I wonder today who we would cry for to be alive again, to lead us through the wilderness.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Same Old Thing →

A trend continues to take place in the online world of anonymity. Several websites offer the opportunity to air one’s darkest confessions. Visitors put into words the very thing they have spent a lifetime wanting no one to know about themselves. While visiting, they can also read the long-hidden confessions of others, and recognize a part of humanity that is often as obscured as their own secrets—namely, I am not the only one with a mask, a conflicted heart, a hidden skeleton. “Every single person has at least one secret that would break your heart,” one site reads. “If we could just remember this, I think there would be a lot more compassion and tolerance in the world.” Elsewhere, one of these sites made news when one of its anonymous users posted a cryptic message seemingly confessing to murder, catching the attention of Chicago Police.(1)

So often the world of souls seems to move as if instinctively to the very things asked of us by a sagacious God. The invitation to confess is present in the oldest stories of Scripture. After his defiance of God’s request, Adam is asked two questions that invite an admission of his predicament; first, “Where are you?” and later, “Who told you that you were naked?” God similarly inquires of Cain after the murder of Abel, “Where is your brother?” Through centuries of changing culture and the emerging story of faith, this invitation to confess is given consistently. “Therefore confess your offenses to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed,” writes the author of James 5:16. A similar thought is proclaimed in 1 John 1:7. “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” Perhaps the call to transparency is not from a God who delights in the impoverishment of his subjects, but a God who knows our deepest needs.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Out of Obscurity →

“I shut my eyes in order to see,” said French painter, sculptor, and artist Paul Gauguin. As a little girl, though completely unaware of this insightful quote on imagination, I lived this maxim. Nothing was more exhilarating to me than closing my eyes in order to imagine far away exotic lands, a handsome prince, or a deep enough hole that would take me straight to China!

In fact, like many, imagination fueled my young heart and mind. After reading C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, I would walk into dark closets filled with warm winter coats fully expecting to be transported like the Pevensie children into strange, new worlds. Charlotte’s Web took me to a farm where I could talk to animals, like Fern to her pet pig Wilbur or to the spiders that hung from intricate webs in my garage. Pictures on the wall came to life and danced before me; ordinary objects became extraordinary tools enabling me to defeat all those imaginary giants and inspiring me toward endless possibility.

Sadly, as happens to many adults, my imagination has changed. I don’t often view my closet as a doorway to unseen worlds, nor do I pretend that my dogs understand one word of my verbal affection towards them. Pictures don’t come to life and I no longer pretend my garden rake or broom is a secret weapon against fantastical foes. Often, I feel that my imagination has become nothing more than wishful thinking. Rather than thinking creatively about the life I’ve been given, I daydream about what my life might be like if I lived in Holland, for example, or could backpack across Europe, or lived on a kibbutz, or was a famous actress, or a world-renowned tennis player, or any number of alternative lives to the one I currently occupy.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Re-imagining Life →

In a 2002 article in The Guardian, author Salman Rushdie, inspired by bouts of violence in his native India, articulated a now-common view on religion. The article was titled, “Religion, as ever, is the poison in India’s blood.” In it, Rushdie outlined the familiar stance of the vociferous new atheists, bidding the world to stop speaking of religion in the fashionable language of “respect” and skating around the obvious conclusions about both God and religion. He writes:

“What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion’s dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! […] India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.“(1)

Rushdie’s voice is merely one among many in the increasingly prevalent conversation about God, religion, and violence. Against Christianity, the critiques come quite specifically. Richard Dawkins describes the Christian story as vicious, sado-masochistic, and repellent, symptomatic of a violent God, a Bible full of violence, and followers willing to overlook that violence, or worse, to embrace it. For Dawkins and his conspirators, God is the problem that initiates the problem of violence: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can be desensitized to their horror.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Is Religion Violent? →

I had no idea why tears so abruptly filled my eyes. I was crying before I understood why I might be crying. But the sense that the reaction meant something was as real to me as the tears.

I was seated alone in a packed crowd at Duke University’s stunning neo-gothic chapel, listening very intently as Scottish composer James MacMillan conducted his St. Luke Passion for choir and orchestra. The core text of the piece is taken word for word from Luke’s Gospel. The narrative begins as Jesus and his disciples prepare for their last meal together and ends with the last breath of Christ on the cross, the centurion exclaiming what the angry crowd moments earlier would not: “Certainly this man was innocent.” At any point, for any number of reasons, tears were certainly explicable, appropriate even. But there was something very particular about this moment which gave me pause months, even years, thereafter. My body seemed to rush ahead of any sort of conscious thinking. This was not a slow climb of emotion welling up as tears that eventually fell. I was not reckoning with a particular thought or concept that suddenly clicked. Rather, my eyes seemed to confess that my brain and body were up to something, caught up in an activity that the conceptual part of me hadn’t yet realized.

Neurologists and therapists experienced with the power of music wouldn’t find in my description anything much out of the ordinary. “Listening to music is not just auditory,” writes the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, “it is motoric as well: ‘We listen to music with our muscles,’ as Nietzsche wrote. We keep time to music, involuntarily, even if we are not consciously attending to it, and our faces and postures mirror the ‘narrative’ of the melody, and the thoughts and feelings it produces.”(1) The use of music in a wide range of therapies has long been known effective, helping patients who have difficulty with language, cognition, or motor control, even as the processes involved remain somewhat mysterious. Recent advancements in the field of neurology and brain-imaging offer much insight into the brain’s activity in the midst of music-making and music-hearing. With increasing light being shed on the brain’s plasticity (its ability to change) and music’s ability to activate and engage entire regions and networks within the brain, music is increasingly being engaged as an effective component of rehabilitative care.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Do Not Be Afraid →

The sharp distinction between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith common in New Testament studies has proven to be an inexhaustible mine for those searching for melodramatic ideas to bounce around during important Christian holidays. The historical Jesus is taken to be the merely human person who was born and raised in Palestine and was crucified during the days of Pontius Pilate. The Christ of faith is assumed to be a mythical, supernatural figure invented by the early admirers of the earthly Jesus. Such thinking flourished in eighteenth century German biblical scholarship, particularly after the posthumous publication of the private notes of Herman Samuel Reimarus between 1774 and 1778.

Inspired by Reimarus’s doubts concerning the historicity of the biblical record, many other scholars published monographs in which they cast Jesus in various religious and cultural roles unhinged from the supernatural. The whole movement, which became known as “the old quest of the historical Jesus,” was brought to a near screeching halt by the 1906 publication of Albert Schweitzer’s book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, whose title also branded the movement. Schweitzer demonstrated that the scholars of the old quest shared something in common—they relied heavily on their presuppositions about who they believed Jesus was and so “each individual created him in accordance with his own character.”(1) In other words, each one of them ended up producing the Jesus they went out looking for in the first place.

Unfortunately, the tendency to recast Jesus in our own image continues even in our day. In scholarly circles, it is represented by the Jesus Seminar which refuses to allow the possibility of the supernatural for those who have “seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope.”(2) Even among believers, it rears its ugly head whenever we prefix the name of Jesus with the possessive pronoun “my” in order to secure our turf from unwelcome scrutiny. A few years ago, a friend and I attended a church in which several people broke out in convulsive laughter in the middle of the worship service. My friend later informed me that they were laughing in Jesus. I knew something about the historical Jesus, but this was my first encounter with the hysterical Jesus and further evidence of his protean flexibility in human hands.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Fairest Jesus of Them All →

Dale Henderson gives cello concerts in New York City subway stations because he fears the day when classical music will be no more. He plays for free, focusing primarily on Bach Solo Cello Suites because their “power and beauty unfailingly inspire great appreciation, joy and deep emotion in those who hear them.”(1) Some commuters stop and stare, curious or captivated, many having never heard a cello or Bach concerto before. For Henderson, the music is an offering of something meaningful, seeds for future generations of classical music admirers who would not otherwise know it, beauty well worth lugging his heavy cello down into the subways to protect.

It is not always easy to talk about beauty without a minefield of objections or at best complicating list of qualifiers. Its modern place in the “eye of the beholder” gives it a tenuous feel at best. It’s ancient place as a perfect and ancient ideal is equally abstract. While Henderson describes a world without classical music as soul-less, others may not miss it so much. And the contrast of beauty in a broken and breaking world makes its distinctive encounters increasingly stand out.

One author describes the common, but individual, effect of our varied encounters of the beautiful this way: “‘Beauty’ seems suited to those experiences that stop us in our tracks. Whether it’s a painting called Broadway Boogie-Woogie or a scherzo by Paganini, the beautiful is conducive to stillness. It doesn’t excite us, or necessarily instill in us the desire to replicate it; it simply makes us exist as though we’re existing for that very experience.”(2) His words are rife with the power of beauty to create longing, a desire to somehow participate. Beauty indeed leaves us with the ache of longing for another taste, another glimpse. And for each of us, this longing can come at unique or unsuspecting times—at the spectacular sight of the giant sequoias or a tiny praying mantis, at a concert or watching a First Nation powwow and taking in the colors, the drums, the survival of a betrayed people.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Cello in the Rush →

As a young girl, I had the unique opportunity to travel to South Africa. We stayed for a month in December when I was just five years old. My father’s parents and sister had immigrated to South Africa from Britain and it was a rare opportunity to travel to see them. I can still remember the excitement of climbing into the Pan Am jet that would take me to what was surely a land full of adventure. The year was 1971.

Never in my young life had I experienced a place so unlike anything I knew. Growing up in the suburban Midwest of the U.S., my world was filled with snow and concrete, winters lasting long into April with rows and rows of houses lined with sidewalks. South Africa, by contrast, was a land of bright sunshine, vast horizons, beautiful ocean beaches, rugged mountains and diverse landscapes: from the dusty Kalahari Desert to the mountainous coast of Cape Town. Every place was a startling, new discovery of sights, smells, and experiences.

One such experience remains with me to this day. Thirsty after an afternoon at a trampoline park with my South African cousins, we went in search of public drinking fountains. Seeing just such an area not too far beyond where my tired legs could carry me, I ran ahead of the others in order to quench my thirst. Just as I leaned over to drink, a hand grabbed my shoulder and a loud, gruff voice told me not to drink from that fountain. It was for “coloreds” only.

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Science fiction novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said of one of his most recurrent characters, “Trout was the only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. He had spoken of this possibility several times to his parakeet. He had said, for instance, ‘Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I’m a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.”(1) In this scene from the book Breakfast of Champions, Kilgore Trout’s haunting suspicion is unveiled before him. Sitting content at a bar, Kilgore is suddenly overwhelmed by someone or something that has entered the room. Beginning to sweat, he becomes uncomfortably aware of a presence disturbingly greater than himself.

The author himself, Kurt Vonnegut, has stepped beyond the role of narrator and into the book itself, and the effect is as bizarre for Kilgore as it is for the readers. When the author of the book steps into the novel, fiction is lost within a new reality. Kilgore senses the world as he knows it collapsing. In fact, this was the author’s intent. Vonnegut has placed himself in Kilgore’s world for no other reason than to explain the meaninglessness of Kilgore’s life. He came to explain to Kilgore face to face that the very tiresome life he has led was, in fact, all due to the pen and whims of an author who made it all up for his own sake. In this twisted ending, no doubt illustrative of Vonnegut’s own humanism, Kilgore is forced to conclude that apart from the imagination of the author he does not actually exist. Ironically, he also must come to terms with the fact that it is because of the author that his very existence has been ridiculous.

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