One of the most interesting stories of conversion to Christian faith I have ever read is that of Malcolm Muggeridge. Educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge and the son of a Labour MP, Muggeridge spent his early career as a member of the Fabian Socialists. He was hired by the Manchester Guardian to be their correspondent in Moscow. This was, of course, the dream job for a young liberal elite. Unfortuately Muggeridge arrived in the USSR right when Stalin was in the process of consolidating his power: not exactly a worker’s paradise. He observed forced starvation of villages and other crimes against the Imago Dei in man.
This led Muggeridge to reject socialism. He returned to England and began to write for a more conservative newspaper. Over the span of his life, he gradually was seemingly drawn to God and the mystery of faith as the only possible way to deal with the madness of life in the modern world. Eventually he was received into the Catholic Church. Given that for most of his life Mugg drank hard, lived hard, and slept with a lot of women other than his wife, he was frequently lampooned as St. Mugg (rather tongue-in-cheek). Despite the obvious “hypocrisy” of his life (someone has remarked that Muggeridge gave up the sins of the flesh just as the sins of the flesh were about to give him up), his coversion to faith was remarkable and produced a number of very significant works.
I commend Thomas Wolfe’s biography (Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography) as a good read. I especially also enjoyed Mugg’s work, Jesus: The Man Who Lives in which he traces depictions of Christ down through the received traditiion of the church. Another good book by Mugg is published by the Bruderhof entitled, A Third Testament.
Jeff Gissing 