Malcolm Muggeridge

It was a short piece about the nature of death, credited to a convicted killer awaiting sentencing in Los Angeles, Charles Manson.

His words ran opposite an interview with a famous Catholic writer under a headline that read, quote, "'From Manson to Muggeridge, or the Reconciliation of Opposites.'" Every detail of that scene is documented.

The robes, the dog, the magazine, the Manson byline.

All of it was real.

Instead, the process handed it a gallon of gasoline.

Church members visited Manson in prison, and in 1971, their magazine's death issue ran that short piece credited to him, the one from the top of this episode.

It was laid against the Catholic writer Malcolm Muggeridge under a headline about reconciling opposites.

To the process, that juxtaposition was theology.

very serious interview.

He's interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge on the BBC.

Now, this comes on the back of the great success of The Queer Fellow.

But he was really drunk.

And that's the lovely message of Mother Teresa.

She had this lovely phrase, you know, a very famous BBC filmmaker called Malcolm Muggeridge went to Calcutta and he said, we make a television program.

And her answer was, yes, but let us make it something beautiful for God.

Something beautiful for God can be anything you do for others or your nearest neighbors, because poverty Maybe you might think of it this way.

I've always tried, and I'm always that guy who finds myself trying to relate a harsh reality that people don't want to believe.

And I'm reminded of something that Malcolm Muggeridge, someone who I'm sure you're very familiar with and appreciate as I have, said when he was, he was talking about the, um, uh, the Stalinist state-engineered famine of Ukraine, and how when he reported on it, that people told him he was lying.

Most notably Walter Duranty, who won, inexplicably, a, a, a Pulitzer Prize for lying.

But Muggeridge was telling people the truth, that millions were dying in Ukraine, and he was denounced.

Our Lord healed the sick, raised Lazarus from the dead, gave back sanity to the deranged.

Malcolm Muggeridge has pointed out, but never did he practice or envisage killing as part of the mercy that held possession of his heart.

Well, fair play to the author for including that great Munkridge quote.

Yo, it's Bluff here.

Instead, it takes as its model Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, which was the work of the lowliest of servants, and Jesus' declaration that the blessed are the meek and the merciful, those who mourn and are pure in heart, who are peacemakers and hunger and thirst for righteousness.

The British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who converted to Christianity late in his life, pointed out that Jesus' entire ministry was directed against the pretensions of earthly power.

Christian humanism, by virtue of its openness to serious scholarship and the importance it places on the life of the mind, provides a needed alternative to the anti-intellectualism and black-and-white thinking that characterizes much of modern American Christianity.

A dozen years ago, I spent time with a close friend, Steve Hayner, shortly before he died.