Reception
Although in more recent seasons Flanders has become a caricature of the Christian right, he is still a favorite of many Christian viewers. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is a confessed Simpsons fan, and likes Flanders. Ned's "unbearable piousness" has been described as "The Simpsons' sharpest critique of organized religion. The show's implicit argument seems to be that humorless obsessives like Ned have hijacked religious institutions, removing them from the center of society to a place where only those who know their brides of Beth Chedruharazzeb from their wells of Zohassadar can seek solace." Steve Goddard, of the website Ship of Fools said "Ned is an innocent abroad in a world of cynicism and compromise. We love him because we know what it's like to be classed as a nerd - and to come out smiling at the end of it."
Read more about this topic: Ned Flanders
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)