Conversion: the Spiritual Jouney of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim. Malcolm Muggeridge. 1988. My first memory of Muggeridge was seeing him on a Firing Line show with William Buckley. I suppose I was in my 20s and still struggling with belief. I was mesmerized by the way these intellectual bigwigs spoke of the centrality of faith in their lives. From that time on Muggeridge was always in the back of my mind. Conversion is a biography of his faith and was one of the last things he wrote. He writes in the third person which I really didn’t like at first, but gradually got used to it. It is beautifully written and full of quotations from various writers. He describes faith as being like falling in love: there is no set formula, no outline, no time frame. It is different for everyone. His comments on communism, socialism, and other ills of the modern world are especially powerful in their simplicity. Muggeridge credited Mother Theresa’s life and her words to him with giving him the courage to be received into the Roman Catholic Church. ( )

Muggeridge wrote about his spiritual journey during the last years of his life in this book. While the writing is uneven, the ideas are fascinating.

He speaks of himself in the third person until the very end of the book, emphasizing the stage of life that he finds himself in. It is a little unsettling, like reading Bo Jackson's autobiography. However, the interior life of the man is fascinating to trace against his outward success.

The book seems written a little too late to get full recall of his states of mind (or maybe he is too honest to pretend that he ever fully understood his own motivations). But he elucidates clearly his inner turmoil, the tension between the desires of the flesh and the longings of the spirit. It is educational to hear of the spiritual journey of an octogenerian who has seen the pinnacles of worldly success tell you that it was not that great and that he was literally suicidal at some of the most interesting moments in his life. ( )