Roger Scruton's Blog, page 21

‘Why Beauty Matters’

This post is just to thank all the many people who have contacted me, either here or by e-mail, to comment on the film, Why Beauty Matters, which I wrote and presented and which was shown last Saturday on BBC2. Most of the comments have been favourable, and I have been very touched by the [...]

'Why Beauty Matters'

This post is just to thank all the many people who have contacted me, either here or by e-mail, to comment on the film, Why Beauty Matters, which I wrote and presented and which was shown last Saturday on BBC2. Most of the comments have been favourable, and I have been very touched by the [...]

The flame that was snuffed out by freedom |

The flame that was snuffed out by freedom | Roger Scruton – Times Online. November 7, 2009. For ten years before 1989 I was in the habit of visiting Eastern Europe to support the fragile underground educational networks there. I would meet my contacts on street corners at prearranged times, to be taken by tram [...]

Thanks to everyone

Very interesting comments, and I apologize for being out of touch for so long – a lot has been happening which has taken my attention away from the discussions on this site. But I now have a new position, at the American Enterprise Institute, and some help with the secretarial side of things. So I [...]

Islam and the West: Lines of Demarcation

Azure Winter Issue, 5769 /2009, No. 35 The West today is involved in a protracted and violent struggle with the forces of radical Islam. This conflict is intensely difficult, both because of our enemy's dedication to his cause, and also, perhaps most of all, because of the enormous cultural shift that has occurred in Europe [...]

Why can’t we clean up our act?

Why can’t we clean up our act? Sunday Times  Magazine, Sunday, 1st March, 2009. The problems of the environment seem so far beyond our reach that we lurch from opinion to opinion and policy to policy with nothing to cling to save the thread of our shared concern. We believe the scaremongers, since nobody can [...]

Why can't we clean up our act?

Why can't we clean up our act? Sunday Times  Magazine, Sunday, 1st March, 2009. The problems of the environment seem so far beyond our reach that we lurch from opinion to opinion and policy to policy with nothing to cling to save the thread of our shared concern. We believe the scaremongers, since nobody can [...]

Roger Scruton

Forgiveness and Irony Wherever the Western vision of political order has gained a foothold, we find freedom of expression: not merely the freedom to disagree with others publicly about matters of faith and morality but also the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule nonsense, including solemnity and nonsense of the sacred kind. This freedom [...]

The Flight from Beauty

Today, provocations and transgressions of borders are celebrated as aestetic ideals. Early modernists like T S Eliot, Matisse and Schönberg, however, did not try to destroy tradition – but to reconquer it. The disruptive, the transgressive and the disturbing are celebrated by the art of our time, with beauty often downgraded as something too sweet, [...]

New Website

New Website, 13 January 2009We are in the process of building a new website, one that is easier for us to manage and easier for you to find things, we hope. So, if you wish to start using it as a place to leave comments the address is: http://rogerscruton.wordpress.com/. We will eventually use the domain name 'rogerscruton.com' once we have got it going properly.The most recent Sunday Times