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.

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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.

Roger Scruton was the voice of meaning in a rudderless world He often seemed like the voice inside our heads, uniquely able to put into words what we knew to be true, yet could rarely express.

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For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a minority of English people became obstinately metaphysical. Some quit these shores, not so much for religious liberty in the abstract, but in the hope of building a more rigorously godly Commonwealth in New England.

The 17th century English Civil War, in which a greater proportion of the male population perished than in the First World War, was fuelled by religious passions. 

Roger Scruton in his 2012 book Our Church identifies this as the seminal period in the creation of the ethos of the Church of England and of what Joseph Addison described in 1712 as the ‘particular bashfulness in everything that regards religion’ on the part of the English people. 

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

The notion of wisdom, and what constitutes it, seems increasingly less understood, and therefore less appreciated, in our age of imprudence. Wise men—and Sir Roger Scruton was one—have become anachronisms of late, relics of a bygone era. St. Thomas Aquinas described a wise man, using Aristotle’s six attributes, as “a man who knows all things, even difficult things, with certitude, and knowledge of the cause, who seeks science for its own sake, and orders and persuades others.” 

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

Eternal Lessons from Wagner’s Last Opera By Barnaby Crowcroft

Roger Scruton finds in this 19th-century work an antidote to many of our modern society’s ills.

The publication of Roger Scruton’s Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption is itself a thing of some historical significance. This is the last book by one of our most eminent recent philosophers, who died of cancer in January this year, about the last opera by the only composer who can also be considered a philosopher in his own right. Parsifal — which premiered in 1882 — was intended by Wagner to be his “farewell to the world.” Yet it remains one of his least accessible works — and to critics one of his most characteristically tedious.

Read the full review online HERE.

Scrutopia friends, join us for the Alumni meeting from Friday 9th until Wednesday 14th July 2021.

We are thrilled to be able to share with you the Programme for our 2021 event. Please click HERE to download. 

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