Guinness Last Call for Liberty

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8308-7337-1
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

Logos Bookstore Association Award World Magazine Book of the Year The hour is critical. The American republic is suffering its gravest crisis since the Civil War. Conflicts, hostility, and incivility now threaten to tear the country apart. Competing visions have led to a dangerous moment of cultural self-destruction. This is no longer politics as usual, but an era of political warfare where our enemies are not foreign adversaries, but our fellow citizens. Yet the roots of the crisis are deeper than many realize. Os Guinness argues that we face a fundamental crisis of freedom, as America's genius for freedom has become her Achilles' heel. Our society's conflicts are rooted in two rival views of freedom, one embodied in '1776' and the ideals of the American Revolution, and the other in '1789' and the ideals of the French Revolution. Once again America has become a house divided, and Americans must make up their minds as to which freedom to follow. Will the constitutional republic be restored or replaced? This grand treatment of history, civics, and ethics in the Jewish and Christian traditions represents Guinness's definitive exploration of the prospects for human freedom today. He calls for a national conversation on the nature of freedom, and poses key questions for concerned citizens to consider as we face a critical chapter in the American story. He offers readers a checklist by which they can assess the character and consequences of the freedoms they are choosing. In the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville, Guinness provides a visitor's careful observation of the American experiment. Discover here a stirring vision for faithful citizenship and renewed responsibility for not only the nation but also the watching world.

Os Guinness (DPhil, Oxford) was born in China and educated in England. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Call, Renaissance, Fool's Talk, Impossible People, and Last Call for Liberty. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow at the EastWest Institute. A frequent speaker and prominent social critic, he has addressed audiences worldwide. A passionate advocate of freedom of religion and conscience for people of all faiths and none, he was the lead drafter for both the Williamsburg Charter and the Global Charter of Conscience. He lives with his wife, Jenny, in the Washington, DC, area.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Guinness, Os

Leseproben

Let my people go!

MOSES, TO THE PHARAOH OF EGYPT, EXODUS

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, that you and your children may live.

MOSES, TO THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL, DEUTERONOMY

Remember the earliest of days; grasp the years of generations that have been. Ask your father—he will tell you all; ask the elders of your kind, and they will say.

MOSES, DEUTERONOMY

The citizens chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority, and at length . . . they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten. And this is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs dictatorship. . . . The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.

PLATO, THE REPUBLIC

We can endure neither our vices nor their cures.

LIVY, THE HISTORY OF ROME

A man in a boat began to bore a hole under his seat. His fellow passengers protested. “What concern is it of yours?” he responded. “I am making a hole under my seat, not yours.” They replied, “That is so, but when the water enters and the boat sinks, we too will drown.”

RABBI SHIMON BAR YOHAI

Should any one of our nation be asked about our laws, he will repeat them as readily as his own name. The result of our thorough education in our laws from the very dawn of intelligence is that they are, as it were, engraved on our souls.

JOSEPHUS, CONTRA APIONEM

Pray for the welfare of the government, for if not for the fear of it, each man would swallow his neighbor alive.

RABBI HANINA

When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty.

CONFUCIUS

Thus a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.

ST. AUGUSTINE, CITY OF GOD

For so long as one hundred men remain alive, we shall never under any condition submit to the domination of the English. It is not for glory or riches or honors that we fight, but only for liberty, which no good man will consent to lose but with his life.

THE DECLARATION OF ARBROATH, SCOTLAND, 1320

The best instituted governments, like the best constituted animal bodies, carry in them the seeds of their destruction: and though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend to their dissolution. Every hour they live is an hour the less that they have to live.

HENRY ST. JOHN, VISCOUNT BOLINGBROKE, 1738

Free peoples, remember this maxim: liberty can be gained, but never regained.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, 1762

There is not a more difficult subject for the understanding of men than to govern a large Empire upon a plan of liberty.

EDMUND BURKE, SPEECH, 1776

The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.

THOMAS PAINE, COMMON SENSE, 1776

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.

JOHN ADAMS, APRIL 1777

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

EDMUND BURKE, LETTER TO A MEMBER OF THE
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF FRANCE, 1791

All projects of government formed of a supposition of continual vigilance, sagacity, virtue, and firmness of the people, when possessed of the exercise of supreme power, are cheats and delusions.

JOHN ADAMS, DEFENSE OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION, 1794

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

DAVID HUME

The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.

GEORGE WASHINGTON, FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS, 1789

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

GEORGE WASHINGTON, FAREWELL ADDRESS, 1796

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the times in which we live I am ready to worship it.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

I have already said enough to put Anglo-American civilization in its true light. It is the product (and one should continually bear in mind this point of departure) of two perfectly distinct elements which elsewhere have often been at war with one another but which in America it was somehow possible to incorporate into each other, forming a marvelous combination. I mean the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom. The rest of democracy in America essentially plays out these themes and their successes, their failures, their weaknesses, their promises, and their threats.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

There is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

Our political problem now is “Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever—half slave and half free?” The problem is too mighty for me. May God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, LETTER TO GEORGE ROBERTSON, 1855

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.

LORD MACAULAY, LETTER TO A FRIEND, 1857

I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here in the place where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live. . . . I have never asked anything that does not breathe from those walls. All my political warfare has been in favor of the teachings coming forth from that sacred hall. May my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if ever I prove false to those teachings.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, AT INDEPENDENCE HALL, PHILADELPHIA,
EN ROUTE TO HIS INAUGURATION, 1861

May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of Civil War, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted on us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has grown. But we have forgotten God.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, NATIONAL FAST DAY PROCLAMATION,
MARCH 1863

Responsibility: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck, or one’s neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.

AMBROSE BIERCE, THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY

In the strictest sense the history of liberty dates from 1776, for “never till then had men sought liberty knowing what they sought.”

LORD ACTON

The instructions of a secular morality that is not based on religious doctrines are exactly what a person ignorant of music might do, if he were made a conductor and started to wave his hands in front of musicians well rehearsed in what they were performing. By virtue of its own momentum, and from what previous conductors had taught the musicians, the music might continue for a while, but obviously the gesticulations made with the stick by a person who knows nothing about music would be useless and eventually confuse the musicians and throw the orchestra off course.

LEO TOLSTOY, A CONFESSION AND OTHER RELIGIOUS WRITING

Starting with unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, THE POSSESSED

The American Government and the Constitution are based on the theology of Calvin and the philosophy of Hobbes.

JAMES BRYCE, THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH

Ideas are dangerous, but...