All posts tagged Bradley Jersak

  • July 9, 2023

    An Introduction to Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and “Confession”

    This is my introduction to a new book on Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Confession by Ron Dart and Bradley Jersak.

    An Introduction to Tolstoy’s
    War and Peace and Confession
    Brian Zahnd

    We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.
    WAR AND PEACE

    I was listening to an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim, talking about God, faith, life, and salvation, and a knowledge of faith was opened up to me.
    CONFESSION

    Maybe it’s the long Russian winters. Maybe that’s what explains the length of those ponderous novels produced by the great nineteenth-century Russian writers — among whom Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy are the undisputed champions. But it’s not for their voluminous size that works like Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Brothers Karamazov are beloved and still being read. We love them for their genius, their beauty, their insight into the human condition, and their artistic truth-telling. That Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as Russian contemporaries and literary rivals never actually met one another seems as curious as it is tragic. And I refuse to be drawn into the interminable debate over which of these two literary titans was the greater writer. But as a Dostoevsky devotee I will concede that in terms of descriptive prose, Leo Tolstoy is unsurpassed. As someone observed (I’ve forgotten who) in Tolstoy no two horses are the same. To read Tolstoy is not to read a sketch of the world but to encounter the real world in the mirror of the written word. Isaac Babel, a Russian writer executed by Soviet secret police in 1940, said, “If the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”
    Read more

    No Comments / Books, Uncategorized /

  • October 28, 2022

    “Something Is Happening Here”

    Bradley Jersak’s tremendous new book, Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction, releases November 22, 2022. I had the privilege of writing the foreword for Out of the Embers, and I would like to share it with you in the ardent hope that it will inspire you to read what Steve Bell has described as “a most wise, kind, and timely gift for those of us whose very faith has been traumatized by the tumult of our age.”

    BZ

    FOREWORD: “SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE”

    Something is happening here
    But you don’t know what it is
    —Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”

    North America has experienced two episodes of Christian revival known as Great Awakenings — the first in the eighteenth century, the second in the nineteenth century. Both produced a remarkable increase in church membership. (Whether the Jesus movement and the charismatic renewal of the late twentieth century qualify as a third Great Awakening is for others to decide.) But now, in the early twenty-first century, the church in North America is experiencing a precipitous decline — a mass exodus that Bradley Jersak has aptly dubbed “the Great Deconstruction.”

    Something is definitely happening here. Mister Jones, the baffled reporter from a bygone age in Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” may not know what is happening, but there are others who do. American Christianity as a colonial extension of European Christendom has run its course and is no longer tenable — at least, not as the default religion and organizing center in an increasingly secular society. The phenomenon of what has been popularly labeled “deconstruction” is not a passing fad but names a genuine crisis of faith that millions of Christians, largely through no conscious decision of their own, are now facing. Once a Christianity corrupted by civil religion, consumerism, and clerical abuse is put on trial, the fate of Christian faith hangs in the balance. And, for many people, the jury is still out. It is certainly possible to deconstruct Christianity down to nothing. This has been the experience of many. But then what? What happens after the Great Deconstruction?
    Read more

    No Comments / Books, Uncategorized /

  • October 26, 2021

    Escaping the Cave

    Two weeks from today (November 9) When Everything’s on Fire will be released. To possibly pique your interest, I’m sharing Bradley Jersak’s foreword to the book. (It contains an excellent analysis of Plato’s famous cave allegory that is definitely worth reading.)

    BZ

    _____________________________________

    Foreword

    Frankenstein and Faust are yet the rage
    Unspeakable, the severing damage done
    Yet on the wind, the distant sound of drum
    And the sweetness of the sage
    Still might come a kinder age . . .
    –Steve Bell, Wouldn’t You Love to Know

    Friends of the truth, the book you are about to read brought me tears of both grief and joy. I moaned over the darkness revealed as darkness and laughed with hope as Easter dawn was unveiled afresh. This book is the word of the Lord. (Thanks be to God). I know this because “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy,” and that Spirit reverberates throughout these pages.
    Read more

    No Comments / Books, Jesus, Philosophy, When Everything's on Fire /