Last Call for Liberty: How America's Genius for Freedom Has Become Its Greatest Threat
December 12, 2018 12:00 ET

The American republic is facing 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.

Join Dr. Os Guinness as he considers the roots of the current divisive climate in America. He will share how the current crisis is rooted in two divergent understandings of freedom: one born of the first ideals of the American Revolution (1776), and the other born out of the French Revolution (1789) and its heirs. The discussion will call hearers to consider deeply the historical roots of their own concept of freedom as well as to choose which view of freedom to uphold, as though our country's future depends on it.

Os Guinness is an author and social critic. Great-great-great grandson of Arthur Guinness, the Dublin brewer, he was born in China in World War II where his parents were medical missionaries. A witness to the climax of the Chinese revolution in 1949, he was expelled with many other foreigners in 1951 and returned to Europe where he was educated in England. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of London and his D.Phil. in the social sciences from Oriel College, Oxford.

Os has written or edited more than thirty books, including The Call, Time for Truth, Unspeakable, A Free People's Suicide, and The Global Public Square. His latest book, Last Call for Liberty: How America's Genius for Freedom Has Become Its Greatest Threat, was published in 2018.

Since moving to the United States in 1984, Os has been a Guest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies, a Guest Scholar and Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum and the EastWest Institute in New York. He was the lead drafter of the Williamsburg Charter in 1988, a celebration of the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, and later of “The Global Charter of Conscience,” which was published at the European Union Parliament in 2012. Os has spoken at many of the world’s major universities, and spoken widely to political and business conferences across the world. He lives with his wife Jenny in the Washington, D.C. area.

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