'We are heartbroken but also very angry'

“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality and the most intellectually resisted fact.”The name of the man who made this pronouncement may not mean much to many readers now. Yet the world he warned about has arrived all the same, whether his name is remembered or not.When Malcolm Muggeridge — a British journalist and broadcaster who became a public figure in his own right — died in 1990, many of his fears still felt abstract. The moral strain was visible, but the structure was holding. Progress was spoken of with confidence, and freedom still sounded uncomplicated.'I never knew what joy was until I gave up pursuing happiness.'Today, those assumptions lie in pieces. What he distrusted has hardened into dogma. What he questioned has become unquestionable. We are living amid the consequences of ideas he spent a lifetime probing.Theory meets realityMuggeridge was never dazzled by modern promises. He distrusted grand schemes that claimed to perfect humanity while refusing to reckon with human nature. That suspicion wasn’t a pose; it was learned. As a young man, he flirted with communism, drawn in by its certainty and its language of justice. Then he went to Moscow. There, theory met reality.What he encountered was not liberation but deprivation. Hunger was rationalized as hope. Cruelty came wrapped in benevolent language. Compassion was loudly proclaimed and quietly absent. The experience cured him of fashionable idealism for life. It also taught him something harder to accept: Evil often enters history announcing itself as virtue, and the most dangerous lies are told with complete sincerity.That lesson stayed with him. In an age once again thick with certainty, that insight feels uncomfortably current.Pills and permissivenessYet Muggeridge’s critique extended beyond politics. At heart, he believed the modern crisis was spiritual. God had become an embarrassment, sin a diagnosis, and responsibility something to be displaced by grievance. Pleasure, once understood as a byproduct of order, was recast as life’s purpose. The result, he argued, wasn’t freedom but loss.This realism shaped his opposition to the sexual revolution. Long before its consequences were obvious, he warned that freedom severed from restraint wouldn’t liberate people so much as hollow them out. He mocked the belief that pills and permissiveness would deliver happiness. What he anticipated instead was loneliness, instability, and a culture increasingly medicated against its own dissatisfaction.Muggeridge also understood the media with unsettling clarity. As a journalist and broadcaster, he watched newsrooms trade substance for spectacle and truth for approval. When entertainment becomes the highest aim, he warned, reality soon becomes optional.By the end of his career, Muggeridge had dismantled nearly every modern promise. Fame proved thin. Desire disappointed. Professional success brought no lasting peace. Skepticism could clear the ground, but it could not explain why nothing worked.A skeptic stands downWhen after more than a decade of exploring Christianity, Muggeridge finally entered the Catholic Church in 1982, the reaction among his peers was disbelief bordering on embarrassment. This was not the impulse of a sentimental seeker but of one of Britain’s most famous skeptics — a man who had mocked piety, distrusted enthusiasm, and made a career of puncturing illusions.Friends assumed it was a late-life affectation, a theatrical flourish from an aging contrarian. Muggeridge himself knew better. He had not converted because Christianity felt safe or consoling, but because, after a lifetime of alternatives, it was the only account of reality that still made sense.As he had written years before in "Jesus Rediscovered," “I never knew what joy was until I gave up pursuing happiness.”That sentence captures the logic of his conversion. Muggeridge did not arrive at faith through nostalgia or temperament. Christianity did not flatter him. It named pride, lust, and cruelty plainly, then offered grace without euphemism. It explained the world he had already seen — and himself within it.RELATED: Chuck Colson: Nixon loyalist who found hope in true obedience Washington Post/Getty ImagesTruth enduresHis Catholicism was not an escape from seriousness but its culmination. He believed human beings flourish within limits, not without them; that desire requires direction; that pleasure without purpose corrodes. Christianity endured, he argued, not because it was comforting but because it was true.After his conversion, Muggeridge did not soften. He sharpened. The satire retained its bite. The warnings grew more direct. But they were no longer merely critical. Skepticism had given way to clarity — not because he had abandoned reason, but because he had finally stopped pretending it was enough.More than three decades after his death, Muggeridge’s voice sounds less like commentary than like counsel. The world he warned about has arrived. What remains is the stubborn relevance of faith grounded in reality — and the freedom that comes only when truth is faced, rather than fled.

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by Frank Bergman, Slay News: A chilling new “suicide pod” has been unveiled that seeks to streamline the euthanasia process by gassing two people to death at once, all while being powered by artificial intelligence (AI) automation to eliminate human safeguards. The disturbing new AI-powered “suicide pod” is being pushed forward by a radical euthanasia […]

Why does the Gospel of John read so differently than Matthew, Mark, and Luke? I wrestled with that question as I began reading the Gospels as a young teenager. Only later did I discover that Christians have been grappling with this same question since the earliest days of the church. I believe part of the answer lies in John’s use of the Old Testament. Grasping John’s use of Scripture is crucial to understanding his Gospel, especially when considering the significance of Jesus’s crucifixion in John’s theology. John sharpens our theology of the cross through an Old Testament lens. Although John’s Gospel contains the fewest Old Testament quotations of the four, we find allusions on every page. Many of John’s most distinctive themes and images come from the Old Testament, including Jesus as the “good shepherd” and the “true vine” (10:11; 15:1). In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), Jesus offers a threefold prediction of his death and resurrection on his journey to Jerusalem (Mark 8:31–32; 9:30–31; 10:33–34 and parallels). These sayings, however, aren’t included in the Fourth Gospel. John does include a threefold series where Jesus speaks of being “lifted up” (John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32). The three sayings effectively serve as John’s counterpart to Jesus’s passion predictions in the Synoptics. These sayings reveal that Jesus’s death on the cross is also, paradoxically, the hour of his glorification. We see this most clearly in Jesus’s use of Scripture. The word for “lifting up” (hypsoō) has great significance in several Old Testament texts, especially in the book of Isaiah. John calls our attention to these passages to illuminate that the cross isn’t merely the place of Jesus’s suffering; it’s also the moment when God’s glory is supremely revealed. Three ‘Lifted Up’ Sayings Jesus tells Nicodemus, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15). Jesus’s words clearly allude to Moses’s act of setting up the bronze serpent during Israel’s wilderness journey (Num. 21:8–9). The cross isn’t only the place of Jesus’s suffering; it’s also the moment when God’s glory is supremely revealed. Just as God’s people were delivered by the lifting up of the serpent, Jesus’s lifting up will result in eternal life for everyone who believes in him. At this point, it’s unclear to the reader the exact meaning of Jesus’s lifting up. Nevertheless, John links it with our salvation in a veiled sense. The meaning behind the pregnant term, however, gains greater clarity in the second and third sayings. The second saying occurs in John 8:28, during Jesus’s conflict with the Jewish authorities. He tells the Pharisees, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me.” The occasion of his lifting up is also the moment of greatest revelation. At that time, people will understand: “I am he” (egō eimi). The final saying occurs in John 12:32, when Jesus speaks to his disciples about the hour of his glorification. He announces, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” John explicitly links Jesus’s lifting up with his death by offering this commentary: “He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die” (v. 33). At Jesus’s death, when he is lifted up from the earth, Jesus “will draw all people to [himself].” These latter words recall an earlier statement: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day” (6:44). But why did Jesus choose to speak of his death as his “lifting up”? Jesus as Isaiah’s Servant Throughout John’s Gospel, the prophet Isaiah is a key witness to Jesus’s identity and mission. Later in chapter 12, John offers two quotations from Isaiah to explain Jewish unbelief in response to Jesus’s public ministry (vv. 38, 40; cf. Isa. 53:1; 6:10). He states, “Isaiah said these things because he saw [Jesus’s] glory and spoke of him” (John 12:41). John uses the Old Testament by appealing to the broader contexts of his quotations. If we examine the contexts of the quoted passages more carefully, we discover that the phrase “lifted up” (hypsoō) occurs in both passages: “Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted.” (Isa. 52:13) “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple.” (6:1) Isaiah prophesies that the one true God will reveal himself to the world so that all the nations of the earth will turn to him and be saved. John states, “Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him” (12:41). Isaiah saw Jesus’s glory in both the vision of the Lord’s glory in the temple (Isa. 6:1–3) and the glorification of the rejected Servant among all nations (Isa. 52:13–53:12). The one true God will reveal himself to the world so that all the nations of the earth will turn to him and be saved. According to John, then, the moment of the Lord’s greatest revelation and the hour of the Servant’s glorification is when Jesus is lifted up on the cross, exalted in his humiliation. In this way, Jesus’s unique divine identity (“I am he”) is revealed for all who look on him. Together, the three “lifted up” sayings make a stunning claim: The cross of Jesus reveals his divine identity (John 8:28) so that all nations are drawn to him (12:32) to be saved (3:14–15). When we consider Jesus’s crucifixion, we’re not only moved by the pain he suffered; we also marvel at God’s glory revealed. It’s at the cross where we see God most clearly. Charles Spurgeon recalls listening to a sermon on John 3:14–15 when he was a young man struggling in his faith. The preacher lifted up his voice and said, “Look to Jesus Christ! Look! Look! Look! You have nothing to do but to look and live.” Spurgeon recollects, “I saw at once the way to salvation. . . . There and then the cloud was gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun . . . and the simple faith which looks to him alone.”