Rūḥ-i Jahān: Persian 1404

Roger Scruton's work defends human uniqueness and the existence of meaning in a disenchanted world increasingly shaped by atheism. He counters the notion of a meaningless natural world, asserting that the sacred and transcendental are real presences through which humans achieve self-knowledge, freedom, and redemption. Scruton posits the human face as a paradigm of meaning from which we construct our understanding of the world and encounter the divine. He argues that the atheist impulse to erase meaning and avoid judgment is a troubling symptom of our times, manifested in the destructive pursuit of pleasure and consumerism that desecrate the world. The book ultimately offers a vision of religious life as a counterforce to this desecration, offering hope in an era of trial.