The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

by Andrew Klavan

I went to college just as the ideas often called postmodernism were rising up through the educational system. Up to that time—under modernism—academics and intellectuals had considered themselves to be participating in a Great Conversation, an interchange carried on across the centuries by the major thinkers and artists of the Western canon. The idea was that by studying this conversation you could move closer to the Truth and so find a fuller wisdom about reality and what made for the Good Life. Now, though, those intellectuals who derided and even denounced the Western canon and Western values in general had come to the fore. Literature was no longer to be loved and learned from, but deconstructed to reveal its secret prejudices and power plays.

To know myself in them, through them. Because they are what we’ve become. Every blessing from soup bowls to salvation they discovered for us.

Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.

I was grieving over my limitations and the unchangeable past, mourning the ideal childhood I hadn’t had, and the ideal parents my parents couldn’t be.