The Missionary Position E-Book

Christopher Hitchens

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, feted by politicians, the Church and the world's media, Mother Teresa of Calcutta appears to be on the fast track to sainthood. But what makes Mother Teresa so divine? In this frank and damning exposé of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to help the world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish was to serve God. He asks whether Mother Teresa's good works answered any higher purpose than the need of the world's privileged to see someone, somewhere, doing something for the Third World. He unmasks pseudo-miracles, questions Mother Teresa's fitness to adjudicate on matters of sex and reproduction, and reports on a version of saintly ubiquity which affords genial relations with dictators, corrupt tycoons and convicted frauds. Is Mother Teresa merely an essential salve to the conscience of the rich West, or an expert PR machine for the Catholic Church? In its caustic iconoclasm and unsparing wit, The Missionary Position showcases the devastating effect of Hitchens' writing at its polemical best. A dirty job but someone had to do it. By the end of this elegantly written, brilliantly argued piece of polemic, it is not looking good for Mother Teresa. - Sunday Times

Leseprobe

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (1949–2011) was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a columnist for Slate. He was the author of numerous books, including works on Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell, Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as his international bestseller and National Book Award nominee, God Is Not Great. His memoir, Hitch-22, was nominated for the Orwell Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

BOOKS

Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger

Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies

Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles

Why Orwell Matters

No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton

Letters to a Young Contrarian

The Trial of Henry Kissinger

Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography

god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Hitch-22: A Memoir

Mortality

PAMPHLETS

Karl Marx and the Paris Commune

The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq

ESSAYS

Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays

Arguably: Essays

COLLABORATIONS

Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)

Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question

(with Edward Said)

When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kashi)

International Territory: The United Nations, 1945–95

(photographs by Adam Bartos)

Vanity Fair’s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)

Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing

(edited with Christopher Caldwell)

Is Christianity Good for the World? (with Douglas Wilson)

Hitchens vs. Blair: The Munk Debate on Religion (edited by Rudyard Griffiths)

First published in 1995 by Verso, an imprint of New Left Books.

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2021 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Christopher Hitchens, 1995

Foreword to the Atlantic Books edition copyright © 2012 by Thomas Mallon The moral right of Christopher Hitchens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The moral right of Thomas Mallon to be identified as the author of the foreword has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 224 2

E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 840 1

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Edwin and Gertrude Blue: saintly but secular.

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A Miracle

Good Works and Heroic Virtues

Ubiquity

Afterword

Foreword

During the middle of the last decade, in his great period of political apostasy, Christopher Hitchens often entertained, along with his older left-leaning pals, a sprinkling of younger conservative journalists and operatives, all of them not only thrilled to be in his company—who ever wasn’t?—but also grateful and deeply reassured to have such a blue-chip intellectual on their side of the Iraq War, that historical moment’s great divide.

I would smile quietly while these young men cheered him on and hear-hear’d. Just wait, I’d think, knowing the moment would arrive when the ideological fiddler would have to be paid, when the host would change the topic and the earnest and happy young men would be reduced to looking at their shoes and muttering Oh, well, yes, I suppose. I like to think of this as the Mother Teresa Moment, named for Hitch’s most incendiary cultural dissent but applicable to any subject that might startle the Christian soldiers of the Bush administration into remembering that, apart from Saddam Hussein, Hitch remained entirely his unreconstructed secular and socialist self.