Culture Counts.

Culture Counts

Roger Scruton

Encounter Books

900 Broadway, Suite 400, New York, NY 10003

9781594031946 $20.00 www.encounterbooks.com 1-800-786-3839

Written by Roger Scruton (Research Professor, Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington,

Virginia), Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged declares that rumors of the demise of Western culture are greatly exaggerated. Countering academic, external, and internal critics of Western Culture, such as dismissive attitudes toward the legacy of "dead white European males", Culture Counts reveals Western cultural contributions to moral education, defends traditional architecture and figurative painting, and urges renewed respect for the positive achievements of Western civilization. "We should see culture as Schiller and other Enlightenment thinkers saw it: the repository of emotional knowledge, through which we can come to understand the meaning of life as an end in itself. Culture inherits from religion the 'knowledge of the heart' whose essence is sympathy. But it can be passed on and enhanced, even when the religion that first engendered it has died. Indeed, in these circumstances, it is all the more important that culture be passed on, since it has become the sole communicable testimony to the higher life of mankind." A highly recommended, thought-provoking philosophical treatise.