released 9/2/2022

In the second of three essays, theologian John Betz describes the differences between the understanding of freedom in classical and Christian antiquity and its modern and postmodern translations. Freedom for the sake of conforming to the Good — for conformity to the divine image in which we were created — has been replaced by freedom as the space to choose whatever we want. How did we get here? Ken Myers reads this essay — “Freedom on Holiday: The Genealogy of a Cultural Revolution” — which was originally published in 2021 at the Church Life Journal website. Thanks to Church Life Journal for granting permission to share this essay with our listeners.  [The first essay in this series was titled “We Hold These Freedoms: Modern, Postmodern, Christian.” The third was “Light from Neither the East nor the West.”]

(52 minutes)

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In 2009, John Betz was interviewed for one of our special Conversations, speaking then about his book, After Enlightenment: The Post-secular Vision of J. G. Hamann (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) The eighteenth-century philosopher and translator, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), was a critic and contemporary of Immanuel Kant and other prominent figures of the German Enlightenment. Hamann — even from the early stages of the Enlightenment — perceived and argued that the project of modernity would lead to its own destruction. Read more and listen here.

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