Read all the latest news from Scrutopia HERE.

Local communities will be at the heart of plans to make sure that new developments in their area are beautiful and well-designed, under proposals outlined by Housing Secretary Rt Hon Robert Jenrick MP today (30 January 2021) You can listen to the announcement here.

We are pleased to read that Building Better Building Beautiful Commission recommendations have been taken up by the government in its formal response which can be found here. 

Read all the lastest news from Scrutopia HERE.

Perhaps one of the finest obituaries to have been written which has appeared in the Jesus College Cambridge Annual Review, 2020 by Stephen Heath, whom we didn’t know, but who clearly followed Roger’s work closely. Thanks to Professor Heath’s article, Roger has been made to feel at home in Cambridge. You can read the obituary here.

It is easy enough to point out the incoherence of the radicals: the layers of reflexive ideology, senseless iconoclasm, ignorance, and inherently unfulfillable demands. And point them out we should. 

But then what? 

No merely critical standpoint can build, let alone ‘conserve’ anything. One can lament the fire ravaging Notre Dame, but a dislike of fire confers exactly none of the knowledge required to build—or indeed, rebuild—that magnificent monument of Western culture. For that, you need architectural-mathematical understanding, aesthetic vision, as well as stone-carvers, carpenters, vitrailleurs, and so forth. Lamenting the Cathedral’s destruction is one thing; rebuilding it is another.

Sir Roger understood that. You can’t counter nihilism, you can’t defeat the iconoclasts, by critique alone. Indeed, even to focus primarily on critique is already to concede that the game is one of tearing-down, one of destruction.  

Read the full article HERE on the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation website. 

A year ago today, I was in Malmesbury Abbey, the gaunt, half-ruined resting place of England’s first king. It was the day of Roger Scruton’s funeral, and philosophers and prime ministers from around the world had descended on the ancient wool town to honour him, as conspicuous in their grandeur as the Magi at Bethlehem.

Sign in to read the full article on the Telegraph website HERE.

On January 12, 2021, the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation hosted Remembering Roger Scruton, an online memorial event marking the one-year anniversary of Scruton's passing.

'Scruton in Eastern Europe', the event's first session, explored Scruton's work leading underground seminars in then Czechoslovakia with guest speakers Jessica Douglas-Home, Chairman of the Mihai Eminescu Trust, and Dr. Barbara Day MBE, former Executive Director of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, led by moderator Marion Smith, President and CEO of the Victims of Communism Foundation. The session also featured comments from Fisher Derderian, Executive Director of the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, and Dr. Mark Dooley, the executor of Scruton's literary estate.

'Scruton the Man', the event's second session, featured an interview with Michael Gove, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, led by Peter Robinson, host of the Hoover Institution's Uncommon Knowledge.

'Scruton the Philosopher', the event's third session, explored Scruton's work as a Philosopher with guest speakers Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University and Professor Remi Brague of the Sorbonne led by moderator Lord Glasman, Labour life peer in the House of Lords and Founder of Blue Labour.

All sessions are now available to view on YouTube, click HERE. 

Roger Scruton still gives me strength. A year after his death, the philosopher is more relevant than ever.

Ilast saw my friend Roger Scruton on 23 December 2019, at his home in Wiltshire. I was shocked. He was emaciated from chemotherapy and told me plainly that he would die soon. “One has to be reasonable about this”, he said, “it happens to us all.” He was a philosopher to the end.

When the late Roger Scruton sent me a proof of what would be his last book, Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption, I considered it in the same vein as I had all his writings. It was, I believed, yet another brilliant attempt to show a disbelieving world how to find redemption from its fallenness. It is true that he opens the book by observing that Parsifal is Wagner’s answer to “a question that concerns us all: the question of how to live in right relation to others, even if there is no God to help us”. But does this imply that Scruton was, like Wagner, committed to the belief that there is no God?

Read the full article online HERE.