“People have little in common except their prurient interests and morbid fears and anxieties. Necessarily aiming its fare at this lowest-common-denominator target, television gets worse and worse year after year” (George Gilder, Life After Television, p. 15).
Not A Great Man for Bones
“I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has. I think …
Crowns Roll in the Dust
“The world’s way of responding to intimations of decay is to engage equally in idiot hopes and idiot despair . . . In Christian terms, such hopes and fears are equally beside the point. As Christians we know that here we have no continuing city, that crowns roll in the dust and every earthly kingdom …
Clutching at Novelty
“A dying civilization, Christendom, on a swiftly moving, ebbing tide, clutches at any novelty in art and literature, ready to accept and then almost at once reject whatever is new no matter how perverse or abnormal. We have a ‘weariness with striving to be men,’ as the American critic Leslie Fiedler put it” (Malcolm Muggeridge, …
Circus Water
“As detailed word studies by teetotalers have shown, the abuses had gone so far that Corinthians believers were starting to act silly from drinking too much grape juice” (Mother Kirk, p. 109).
And Guess Where We Are
“I must also leave you to analyze the cultural decline of Western art and literature. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as a priest and ends as a clown or buffoon” (Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom, p. 18).
Cooking and Eating
“Of course we know that Word and sacrament go together. But how do they go together? In the minds of many believers, the two go together like ham and eggs, two disparate but complementary elements combining in a pleasing way. But perhaps they go together in another way entirely — one suggestion is that they …
His Canterburyness
“The last Archbishop of Canterbury but one, Dr. Ramsey, appeared not to realize this when, to my amazement, at the end of a performance of Godspell, he rose to his feet and shouted: ‘Long live God,’ which, as I reflected at the time, was like shouting, ‘Carry on eternity’ or ‘keep going infinity.’ The incident …
Warring With Peace
“When we eat and drink at His table, with a servant’s heart, we are not attending a gloomy memorial, sitting in the dark, feeding on a dry cracker. We are engaged, by the mercy and grace of God, in the extension of Christ’s kingdom. We are conquering the world through sitting down in the peace …
Believing Skepticism
“Next to this genius of Pascal’s words I would draw your attention to the beautiful lucidity of his mind, the wonderful clarity of his thought. Like all true believers, he was deeply skeptical” (Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom, p. 4).