Desperately Seeking Something

The Ethiopian eunuch embodies a classic model of a spiritual seeker.

After briefly flirting with church attendance, one TV sitcom character chalks up his experience as generally beneficial because "I finally learned what that guy in the end zone holding up the big card that says 'John 3:16' on it is talking about!"

It may come as a big surprise to long-time churchgoers, steeped in a biblical, Christian experience, accustomed to hearing religious-sounding words and seeing religious-looking symbols, that we now live in a genuinely post-Christian culture, or what I prefer to call pre-Christian culture. Our society is defined far more by all those people who have no clue as to what that guy in the end zone is trying to say than it is by those recognizing the citation of a biblical chapter and verse.

A pre-Christian culture does not mean that there is a lack of spiritual interest or a slacking of spiritual hunger. On the contrary, this postmodern, pre-Christian age has recently awakened with a start to the fact that it is spiritually starving -- and the...