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From Wikimedia Commons: A View of Oxford (William Turner of Oxford, mid 19th century)  

In the mid-twentieth century, the English novelist Evelyn Waugh chronicled, with elegance and melancholy, a world slipping away. His novels, particularly Brideshead Revisited, portray a vision of England rooted in tradition, faith, hierarchy, and cultural refinement — a civilization with the Church at its center, the aristocracy as its stewards, and classical education as its soul.

Today, that England is all but gone. In its place stands a nation that is multicultural, secular (albeit increasingly Islamic), and globalized — a country that has reimagined itself as a bastion of diversity and liberal democracy. For some, this transformation represents progress; for others, it marks a rupture with the spiritual and cultural coherence that once defined the British identity. Waugh’s lament goes beyond changing customs; it is also about a profound civilizational shift — the loss of a unifying narrative, the decline of intellectual and religious sophistication, and the disappearance of belonging rooted in place, faith, and history.

Waugh’s England was one in which identity was tied to continuity. The past was irreducible to a matter of historical interest; it was a living inheritance. The landed estates, the traditions of Oxbridge, the rituals of the Anglican Church — these were the organs of a culture that offered people a place within a larger whole. The aesthetic beauty of this world, its order and manners, were not incidental; they were expressions of a belief in transcendence and hierarchy. In Brideshead Revisited, Waugh’s narrator, Charles Ryder, reflects on the fading grandeur of the Flyte family’s ancestral home — a symbol of both aesthetic and spiritual loss. The novel refrains from offering a naïve endorsement of aristocracy, although it suggests that with its collapse comes the erosion of deeper values: faith, permanence, and cultural cohesion.

In this context, the Church of England served as far more than a religious institution. It was the cultural and moral........

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