8.4 /10 1 Votes
Originally published 1971 | 4.2/5 Goodreads | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Genres Inspirational Fiction, Biography, Autobiography Similar Malcolm Muggeridge books, Catholic Church books, Nun books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Something Beautiful for God is a 1971 book by Malcolm Muggeridge on Mother Teresa. The book was based on a 1969 documentary on Mother Teresa (also entitled Something Beautiful for God) that Muggeridge had undertaken.
In his book Muggeridge, a former left-wing radical who became a stridently religious anti-communist, described in glowing terms the work of Mother Teresa's order of nuns in Calcutta's House of the Dying.
The book was first published by Harper Collins (ISBN 978-0002157698).
Criticism
In his book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice and also in a 1994 documentary entitled Hell's Angel the journalist Christopher Hitchens derided Muggeridge as "that old fraud and mountebank". Hitchens dismissed as risible the account of a "divine light" miracle which Muggeridge claimed to have witnessed in Calcutta's House of the Dying. On viewing footage of the film Something Beautiful for God, Muggeridge attributed the clarity of the images to Teresa's "divine light". Although the more prosaic and realistic explanation was that the BBC cameraman had loaded a new faster film for some poorly lit indoor shots, Muggeridge promoted this "heavenly aura event" as a miracle narrative to the media. Hitchens considers that Muggeridge's subjective interpretation of the events he witnessed in Calcutta and the consequent publicity surrounding those events contributed to Mother Teresa's seraphic reputation.