Born 1903. Graduated Cambridge University 1924. Accomplished British writer, journalist, and television / radio personality. Raised as a socialist, Muggeridge was for many years also a vocal agnostic. He lived as a foreign correspondent for various British media outlets in Egypt, India, the Soviet Union, and Washington, D.C. He became a Christian late in life during the 1960s and spent his latter years as a sort of Christian apologist and thinker.
Much of his life and his decision to embrace Christianity is described in the book Jesus Rediscovered, first published in 1969.
Other works of particular note include:
- 1971 Something Beautiful For God
- 1973 Chronicles of Wasted Time
- 1975 Jesus: The Man Who Lives
- 1977 Christ and the Media
- 1980 The End of Christendom
- 1983 A Third Testament
- 1987 My Life in Pictures
- 1988 Confessions of a 20th Century Pilgrim
Aside from his scathing and cynical wit, Muggeridge is also well-known for his skepticism and criticism of television and film as a viable method for expressing Christian values - or anything of lasting value, for that matter. Christ and the Media, which is a compilation of lectures Muggeridge gave in 1977, concerns this topic. Muggeridge took Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium Is the Message" and essentially asked the question: are the visual media well-suited to any decent message (the Christian one in particular), or do they merely reflect a worthless illusory world? His ideas on this matter can be best summed up in the following quote:
"I see the camera, far more than even nuclear weapons, as the great destructive force of our time; it's replaced the written and spoken word, captured the whole field of art and literature. All the young want to do is to squint down a tiny lens and see all the world in it; the only art they really care about is celluloid. Yet how inferior and evanescent the celluloid products are! Think of all the talent and money that's been sunk in Hollywood, for instance—more, far more, than in all the cities of Renaissance Italy. And the result in terms of even minor art? Nil." - Jesus Rediscovered
Muggeridge was also acquainted with several other well-known 20th century Christian figures, including Billy Graham, John Stott, and Mother Teresa, the latter of which was the subject of his book Something Beautiful for God. It is this book and the television piece that Muggeridge did on Mother Teresa that is generally credited with her introduction to the western world.
Muggeridge joined the Catholic church in 1983. He died in 1990.