Appearing Tuesday on CBN News, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany teared up as she remembered world-renowned Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias, who passed away Tuesday morning from cancer at the age of 74.

A partial transcript is as follows: 

DAVID BRODY: Can I ask you a personal question about Ravi Zacharias, passing away just in the last 24 hours or so. I know his teachings were so important to you, especially at Oxford, you mentioned this. Can you tell me a little bit about what he meant to you personally and the loss for the Christian community?

KAYLEIGH MCENANY: Yeah, it’s a huge loss. You know, my dad said to me, that Billy Graham was the great evangelist. And I think Ravi Zacharias is the great apologist

BRODY: —I know this is tough.

MCENANY: We don’t have to cry because we’re Christians. So we know he’s—

BRODY: Yes, we are human the last time I checked. But the tears come from what? What was it because it feels like Oxford and the development of your faith.

MCENANY: Yes. Ravi is someone that I never met. I know his team, and I know some of those who are around him. But, you know, for me as a Christian, I always had the heart for Jesus Christ that I got a very young age. I was saved when I was in my teens, but to have someone from an academic place, as an apologist could equip you with those arguments where you didn’t have to check your brain at the door when you became a Christian where there is intellectual foundation for everything we believe; there’s prophecy, there’s the human cell, there’s the amazing creation of the human body and all of its complexity and the planet, the universe, and he put a philosophical and academic rationale for the heart that I had for Christ but gave me the ability to go to Oxford, where there are renowned atheist scholars who try to say there’s no intellectual undergirding for Christianity. Ravi Zacharias, who happened to have an office at Oxford, was the person who provided the counter to that, the intelligence behind why we believe what we believe. And you know, your mind can never get you fully there. It’s a place only your heart can take you.

Ravi Zacharias provided those steps to put in the minds of an academic, “Wow, I should give the Christian faith some thought.” Ravi means so much, As I was saying earlier, Billy Graham was the great evangelist. Ravi Zacharias is the great apologist. And, I think the words that were at the very bottom of the announcement today of his passing are so important. He had a verse there and it said, “because I live, you also will live, John 14:19. “And they said that these seven words changed Ravi’s life, 57 years ago. He was on a bed of suicide as he described it, and it was a Bible that was handed to him and those words in particular, that set him on a 57-year path that has truly saved lives.

[H/T CBN NEWS]