Eamon Duffy on English Reformation

From a good, summary article....

But in multicultural England, the inherited Protestant certainties are
fading. It is time to look again at the Reformation story. There was
nothing inevitable about the Reformation. The heir to the throne is
uneasy about swearing to uphold the Protestant faith, and it seems
less obvious than it once did that the religion which gave us the
Wilton Diptych and Westminster Abbey, or the music of Tallis, Byrd and
Elgar, is intrinsically un-English. The destruction of the monasteries
and most of the libraries, music and art of medieval England now looks
what it always was – not a religious breakthrough, but a cultural
calamity. The slaughtered Popish martyrs look less like an alien fifth
column than the voices of a history England was not allowed to have.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9350681/The-story-of-the-Reformation-needs-reforming.html

drifting into oikophilic melancholia

.... If the standard routines of political thought prevent us from confronting the dangers that threaten our planet, we might conclude that it is time to abandon the old stand-off between rightists who want to cling to the past and leftists planning a brave new world. But Scruton will not see it that way. If environmental disaster is the question, he thinks, then leftism is still "the worst thing that can happen", and conservatism the only answer. He knows that conservatism has got itself a bad name by flirting with unbridled capitalism and promoting the idea that there's no motive like the profit motive. But that's never been Scruton's version, and for the past few years he has been conducting a grand exercise in rebranding. He still divides the world into shrewd conservatives and leftist buffoons, but in the new terminology his sort of people are now "oikophiles" (from the Greek "oiko" for house, which is the derivation of "eco"), while the rest of us are benighted "oikophobes".

The English have a word for it too: home-lovers, as opposed to home-haters. I'm not sure why Scruton resorts to Greek, but up to a point I can see what he means. I got through Green Philosophy sitting by an open fire in the old stone cottage where I have lived most of my life, and I can understand why oikophiles such as me might be well-attuned to environmental issues. We like to think of ourselves not as lords and masters of our private patch, but trustees of a heritage that we hope to pass on to successors who will cherish it as we do. On the other hand I cannot get my mind round the idea of oikophobia. The great wanderers of myth and history, from Oedipus to Wotan, from Borrow and Stevenson to Davies and Kerouac, may not have been amiable oikophiles, but they did not have a sinister plan to replace homely hearths with parallelograms of paupers. And if you are homeless, or hate the place where you live, the chances are that you are not suffering from oikophobia, but drifting into oikophilic melancholia, dreaming of the cherishable home you have not got.

- Jonathan Rée, in a review of Roger Scruton, Green Philosophy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/28/green-philosophy-roger-scruton-review#start-of-comments