Free Republic

When a new book came out, the great C. S. Lewis would first seek out an old one on the same subject. That’s good advice for embattled Americans. In fact, two old books address what is happening today with rare perception. Regent College Publishing has reissued The Green Stick and The Infernal Grove, the two volumes of Chronicles of Wasted Time by Malcolm Muggeridge. Paul Johnson called it one of the great autobiographies of our time, which might be an understatement. Wisdom and wit leap off the pages, and there’s even a news hook: Russia has invaded Ukraine and that...

WASHINGTON -- Pope Francis canonized Mother Teresa on Sunday. She was a celestial figure to many for sweating away in Calcutta, India, with "the poorest of the poor." By that oft-used term meant the poor for whom a government poverty line would be a luxury. Mother Teresa took in street urchins, the hopelessly sick and the dying -- lost souls who were at death's door. They were the poor that we Americans can hardly imagine. For the most part, one has to travel to the slums of backward countries to encounter them. I first became aware of Mother Teresa in...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtYcDE-Nw2M

I read with interest The Associated Press article by Dylan T. Lovan that appeared in The News on Feb. 9. His whole point was to paint Ken Ham as a manipulator by quoting David Shultz when he said the claim by Ham that Charles Darwin was a racist was "a ploy to get evolution out of the curriculum." If Lovan had done his research, the motives of Ham would have been a moot point. But alas, he then wouldn't have had any reason for the article. All one has to do is read Darwin's works and his racist statements are...

An extract from The Humane Holocaust dating back to the early 70's. "Which vision are we for? On the one hand, as the pattern of our collective existence, the broiler house or factory-farm, in which the concern is solely for the physical well-being of the livestock and the financial well-being of the enterprise; on the other, mankind as a family, all of whose members, whatever physical or mental qualities or deficiencies they may have, are equally deserving of consideration in the eyes of their creator, and whose existence has validity, not just in itself, nor in relation to history, but...

Piano-player in a brothel Christopher Howse says that Malcolm Muggeridge, born 100 years ago, was very much a man of the 20th-century world — but rebelled against it Twenty years ago Malcolm Muggeridge, with a grimace of welcome, met me at Robertsbridge station, like many another. To reach the Sussex cottage that he shared with Kitty, his wife of 50 years, he had to drive across a fast main road, down which articulated lorries careered. Without slowing down he continued straight across, looking neither to right nor to left. This Russian roulette driving, like his tolerance of curious visitors to...

WASHINGTON, June 12 (UPI) -- What can you expect if you fearlessly expose the systematic, genocidal murder of 10 million people? You can expect to be branded as a liar in the most prestigious newspaper in the United States. You can expect to be murdered yourself by bandits probably in the pay of conspirators perpetrating equally colossal, monstrous crimes against humanity. And you can even to be betrayed after your death and airbrushed out of existence by one of your closest professional colleagues and friends. That was the fate of Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones, a brilliant, idealistic and utterly fearless...

Malcolm Muggeridge A Biography by Gregory Wolfe ISI, 490 pp., $15 THERE ARE NUMBERLESS WAYS in which the faithful may taunt, or perhaps I should better say tease, the unbeliever. One such tactic--and for my money the most irritating--is to say that God believes in you, even if you can't return the compliment. Another is to contrast the modest simplicity of belief with the contortions of the malcontent intellectual. "Don't mind me," says the humble friar or devoted nun, brushing past on some modest errand of altruism. "I'm just doing the Lord's work." Those of us who experience difficulty in...

Abortion and the Conscience of the NationRonald Reagan | 1983 Ronald Reagan, while sitting as the fortieth president of the United States, sent us this article shortly after the tenth anniversary of Roe v. Wade; we printed it with pride in our Spring, 1983 issue, and reprint it now, after Roe's twentieth anniversary, just as proudly. The 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade is a good time for us to pause and reflect. Our nationwide policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy was neither voted for by our people nor enacted by...

The politicization of prizes was never more blatantly revealed than in the comments of two of the members of the committee that awarded former president Jimmy Carter the Nobel Prize for peace. One member clearly implied that the prize was meant as a criticism of the Bush administration, whose "threat of the use of power" he contrasted with Carter’s "principles that conflicts must be resolved as far as possible through mediation and international cooperation." Another member of the Nobel Prize committee was even more explicit that the award "should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current...