Roberta Bayer, Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at Patrick Henry College, and Board Member of the Prayer Book Society USA discusses the late Sir Roger Scruton’s book Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England*
One of the most interesting and prolific of conservative intellectuals in the English world wrote works on subjects ranging from art and aesthetics, to politics, philosophy and religion as well as wine and even hunting. He also wrote a book specifically about his love of the Church of England and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Our Church is a personal history that explains his attachment to the Church of England.
One might wonder at his purpose in writing this impressionistic, personal, and somewhat apologetic, book, which in large part seems to be rhetorical, but in part it must be to convince his fellow countrymen to love and protect their religious and cultural inheritance. English character, English architecture, English literature, politics and society, he argues, have been inspired by the beauty and holiness of the Book of Common Prayer, and the Church’s witness to the transcendence of God in everyday life cannot be reasonably separated from it.
Scruton’s personal faith grew with his acceptance that there are things real which are