Dr. Os Guinness: "A Free People's Suicide: Sustaining Freedom and the American Future"

Socrates in the City host an evening with author and social critic Os Guinness on the topic, "A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future." 

...always free, free always"

Three Tasks:

1.  Winning freedom.

2.  Ordering freedom (structure, e.g. Constitution).

3.  Sustaining freedom - by far, the hardest.

- Yes, Constitution, but more... AND

- "Golden Triangle of Freedom": (i) Freedom requires (ii) virtue (courage, character), which requires (iii) faith, and faith requires freedom (and recycles)

Three Menaces to Freedom:

1.  External menaces.

2.  Polybius "corruption of customs" Alexis de Tocquille "habits of the heart", or "Golden Triangle of Freedom"

3.  Passing of time, "the injuries of time" for fall of Rome; "paradox of freedom" freedom undermines itself; freedom is the power what you ought.

Three Shifts from Founders:

1.  Privatization of religion.

2.  Rise of "proceduralism" or "legal secularism" (Rawls).

3.  Rise of "post-modernism" (no truth, only will to power).

Contemporary Menaces:

1.  Alienation of leaders - no country can survive when its thought-leaders are ignorant...

2.  Breakdown of transmission of American virtues

e.g. public education (custodians of handing down American virtues), immigration (citizenship education)

3.  Corruption of customs.

See and read more at CIVIC EDUCATION...