Made For Freedom

In a fast-paced world overloaded with technology and information, it can be difficult to remember who we are as God’s children. We are called not only to do, to build, and to accomplish, but to be and to love in freedom. Embracing that deeper call requires courage, mired as we are in our own weaknesses as well as the increasing manipulation of others. Yet from the beginning God offers us a life full of love and happiness with Him. At the core of this gift is our freedom and we must struggle to maintain it, defend it, and grow continually in it. In Made for Freedom, author Jutta Burggraf offers a penetrating meditation on freedom and its importance in the life of a Christian. She explains that our ultimate happiness is a result of a humble “yes” to God’s gift of our very selves, accepting both the light and the darkness of who we are. From there, we can go a step further to accept God’s love and invite Him, and only Him to fill the gaps with love and healing. With this humble but honest perspective, we can choose to love ourselves as God loves us, and in turn, to love others.

Describes the early life and career of Harriet Tubman, whose childhood name was Minty, and who's dreams of escaping slavery on the Brodas plantation in the late 1820s came true.

In Galatians, we meet Paul at his most passionate, most personal, and his most political. For him, the heart of the Gospel is: The Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. But for some of his colleagues, faith in Christ is not enough. They want something that will give more of a sense of achievement; they yearn for the more exclusive insignia of the Jewish law. Senior church leaders are confused and compromised. Paul faces this crisis with two further essentials of the Gospel, our unity in Christ and our freedom in Christ. The book shows how, in our own day, the same testing of faith happens, with issues of race, gender, poverty, equality, in a culture which values the achievements of some while treating others with disdain. Written geographically from a Welsh context, this is the Archbishop of Wales’s recommended Lent book for 2016; but it speaks to the wider motivations of our present culture. For the author, Galatians was a primary weapon in the theological struggle against the ideology of apartheid in South Africa; it has a similar relevance for today’s Britain and beyond.

Allison Vesterfelt and her friend were just a few weeks into a 50-state road trip when their car broke down in Wyoming. Unsure of what to do, the two girls found themselves stranded in a small town and dependent on the help of strangers. Through the questions and uncertainty, they contemplated what it means to live life without regret and when it’s worth it to live with less baggage. Read this small section of their road trip story, or find the whole story in Packing Light: Thoughts on Living Life with Less Baggage. Moody Collective Portions are short pieces of content taken from our full-length books. Our goal is to introduce our readers to a complete idea in a brief, concise, and inexpensive format. Most portions will take about 20 minutes to read.

Why does the world speak English? Why does every country at least pretend to aspire to representative government, personal freedom, and an independent judiciary? In The New Road to Serfdom, British politician Daniel Hannan exhorted Americans not to abandon the principles that have made our country great. Inventing Freedom is a much more ambitious account of the historical origin and spread of those principles, and their role in creating a sphere of economic and political liberty that is as crucial as it is imperiled. According to Hannan, the ideas and institutions we consider essential to maintaining and preserving our freedoms—individual rights, private property, the rule of law, and the institutions of representative government—are not broadly "Western" in the usual sense of the term. Rather they are the legacy of a very specific tradition, one that was born in England and that we Americans, along with other former British colonies, inherited. The first English kingdoms, as they emerged from the Dark Ages, already had unique characteristics that would develop into what we now call constitutional government. By the tenth century, a thousand years before most modern countries, England was a nation-state whose people were already starting to define themselves with reference to inherited common-law rights. The story of liberty is the story of how that model triumphed. How, repressed after the Norman Conquest, it reasserted itself; how it developed during the civil wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the modern liberal-democratic tradition; how it was enshrined in a series of landmark victories—the Magna Carta, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the U.S. Constitution—and how it came to defeat every international rival. Yet there was nothing inevitable about it. Anglosphere values could easily have been snuffed out in the 1940s. And they would not be ascendant today if the Cold War had ended differently. Today we see those ideas abandoned and scorned in the places where they once went unchallenged. The current U.S. president, in particular, seems determined to deride and traduce the Anglosphere values that the Founders took for granted. Inventing Freedom explains why the extraordinary idea that the state was the servant, not the ruler, of the individual evolved uniquely in the English-speaking world. It is a chronicle of the success of Anglosphere exceptionalism. And it is offered at a time that may turn out to be the end of the age of political freedom.

A riveting account of one of the most remarkable episodes in American history. In his critically acclaimed history Freedom Summer, award- winning author Bruce Watson presents powerful testimony about a crucial episode in the American civil rights movement. During the sweltering summer of 1964, more than seven hundred American college students descended upon segregated, reactionary Mississippi to register black voters and educate black children. On the night of their arrival, the worst fears of a race-torn nation were realized when three young men disappeared, thought to have been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Taking readers into the heart of these remarkable months, Freedom Summer shines new light on a critical moment of nascent change in America. "Recreates the texture of that terrible yet rewarding summer with impressive verisimilitude." -Washington Post

Why is it that so many people around the world appear willing to give up freedoms in return for either security or prosperity? For the past 60 years it had been assumed that capitalism was intertwined with liberal democracy, that the two not just thrived together but needed each other to survive. But what happens when both are undermined? Governments around the world -- whether they fall into the authoritarian or the democratic camp -- have drawn up a new pact with their peoples. These are its terms: repression is selective, confined to those who openly challenge the status quo, who publicly go out of their way to 'cause trouble'. The number of people who fall into that category is actually very few. The rest of the population can enjoy freedom to travel, to live more or less as they wish, and to make and spend their money. This is the difference between public freedoms and privatefreedoms. We choose different freedoms we are prepared to cede. We all do it. Freedom for Sale will set a new agenda. Mixing narrative from different countries around the world, it breaks new ground in revealing the extent to which the old assumptions and securities have died. It will crucially ask why so many intelligent and ambitious citizens around the world, particularly among the young, seemed prepared to sacrifice freedom of the press and freedom of speech in their quest for wealth. A new world order may well be upon us, and in this gripping and devastating book John Kampfner reveals how it may just be too late to stop it.

This book collects sixteen previously published articles on fatalism, truths about the future, and the relationship between divine foreknowledge and human freedom. It includes a substantial introductory essay and bibliography. Many of the pieces collected here build bridges between discussions of human freedom and recent developments in other areas of metaphysics, such as philosophy of time.