Freedom And Authority In The West

Originally published in 1950 and updated in 1968, this book discusses the functions and status of native chiefs in what were the French colonies in West Africa. It also examines the relation of the French legal code to native law and custom and the activities of Christian missions. Analysing changes which took place in the early 20th century as a result of Africa's entry into the world economy, the book includes proposals for increasing agricultural production and co-operative marketing.

From one of our most widely admired art critics comes a bold and timely manifesto reaffirming the independence of all the arts—musical, literary, and visual—and their unique and unparalleled power to excite, disturb, and inspire us. As people look to the arts to promote a particular ideology, whether radical, liberal, or conservative, Jed Perl argues that the arts have their own laws and logic, which transcend the controversies of any one moment. “Art’s relevance,” he writes, “has everything to do with what many regard as its irrelevance.” Authority and Freedom will find readers from college classrooms to foundation board meetings—wherever the arts are confronting social, political, and economic ferment and heated debates about political correctness and cancel culture. Perl embraces the work of creative spirits as varied as Mozart, Michelangelo, Jane Austen, Henry James, Picasso, and Aretha Franklin. He contends that the essence of the arts is their ability to free us from fixed definitions and categories. Art is inherently uncategorizable—that’s the key to its importance. Taking his stand with artists and thinkers ranging from W. H. Auden to Hannah Arendt, Perl defends works of art as adventuresome dialogues, simultaneously dispassionate and impassioned. He describes the fundamental sense of vocation—the engagement with the tools and traditions of a medium—that gives artists their purpose and focus. Whether we’re experiencing a poem, a painting, or an opera, it’s the interplay between authority and freedom—what Perl calls “the lifeblood of the arts”—that fuels the imaginative experience. This book will be essential reading for everybody who cares about the future of the arts in a democratic society.

In both his novels and in his 2005 essay, How We Live Now, John Twelve Hawks was one of the first authors to warn us about the growing power of surveillance technology. Now he has written a personal and controversial book that shows how our lives are watched and analyzed by governments and international corporations. In a world in which our actions can be monitored by a computerized grid of social control, is there anything we can do to defend our freedom?

Western society is in a crisis: all of us want to be free, but many do not know what true freedom is, much less how to achieve it. Even within the church differing views about the authority of Scripture and its role in Christian life and thought have left split some denominations and left others on the verge of schism. In Freedom & Authority, J.I. Packer shows the true nature of freedom and the only way to experience it. "True freedom," writes Packer, "is found where Jesus Christ is Lord in living personal fellowship. It is under the authority of a fully trusted Bible that Christ is most fully known and this God-given freedom most fully enjoyed. If therefore we have at heart the spiritual renewal for society, for churches, and for our own lives, we shall make much of the entire trustworthy--that is, the inerrancy--of Holy Scripture as the inspired and liberating Word of God." J. I. Packer is Board of Governors' Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. Dr. Packer is author of many books, including Knowing God, A Grief Sanctified, and Keep in Step with the Spirit.

Most treatments of slavery, politics, and expansion in the early American republic focus narrowly on congressional debates and the inaction of elite "founding fathers" such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West, John Craig Hammond looks beyond elite leadership and examines how the demands of western settlers, the potential of western disunion, and local, popular politics determined the fate of slavery and freedom in the West between 1790 and 1820. By shifting focus away from high politics in Philadelphia and Washington, Hammond demonstrates that local political contests and geopolitical realities were more responsible for determining slavery’s fate in the West than were the clashing proslavery and antislavery proclivities of Founding Fathers and politicians in the East. When efforts to prohibit slavery revived in 1819 with the Missouri Controversy it was not because of a sudden awakening to the problem on the part of northern Republicans, but because the threat of western secession no longer seemed credible. Including detailed studies of popular political contests in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri that shed light on the western and popular character of conflicts over slavery, Hammond also provides a thorough analysis of the Missouri Controversy, revealing how the problem of slavery expansion shifted from a local and western problem to a sectional and national dilemma that would ultimately lead to disunion and civil war.