Roger Scruton

Professor of Philosophy and University Professor, Boston University

The Face of God

In his series of lectures, Scruton asserts that one’s relationship to God is of highest importance. As God is widely rejected as incompatible with modern science, Scruton questions what we lose when we no longer hold certain beliefs. Atheism commits systemic acts of aggression against the ‘face’, not only the human face, but the face of the world. He concludes that one escapes from the eye of judgment by blotting out the face, more specifically, the Face of God.

Biography

Roger Vernon Scruton was born on 27 February 1944 in Buslingthorpe, England. A philosopher and intellectual, he was active in aesthetics, art, political philosophy, and dedicated himself to ‘re-enchanting the world’. In 1969, he was Research Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge, moving to Birkbeck College as Lecturer in Philosophy in 1971. Made Reader in 1979 and Professor of Aesthetics in 1985, he was appointed Professor of Philosophy and University Professor at Boston University in 1992, retiring in 1995. 

Research Professor at the Institute of Psychological Sciences in 2005, he held visiting professorships at Princeton in 2006, Oxford in 2009, St Andrews in 2011, and the University of Buckingham in 2015. Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., he gave the Stanton Lectures in 2011. Knighted in 2016, he received awards from the governments of Czechia, Poland, and Hungary for his work liberating them from communism. Editor of The Salisbury Review, important publications include The Meaning Of Conservatism (1980), Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Need to Defend the Nation State (2006), and How to Be a Conservative (2014).

Published/Archival Resources
Published as The Face of God.