Taking Advantage of Freedom: What to Do with Liberty When You Have It [PHOTOS & VIDEO]

On Monday, February 17th at 7:00PM, Dr. David Deavel presented his talk, "Taking Advantage of Freedom: What to Do with Liberty When You Have It” in Winants Auditorium (Graves Hall, 263 College Ave., Holland, MI 49423).  This event was co-hosted by Markets & Morality and the Saint Benedict Institute.

While political, economic, and intellectual freedom is a precious gift to humans, our long history shows that we are ready to give it away. Why is that? One answer might be given from the Nobel-Prize-winning Russian writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008): when people don’t understand and use the freedom they have, they will throw it away to the detriment of themselves and their loved ones. This lecture will give a brief introduction to the life and career of Solzhenitsyn and then outline four enemies of freedom along with the way to defeat them. The goal is to take advantage of freedom in order to preserve it and flourish as individuals and societies.

David Paul Deavel, Ph.D. is editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture and a visiting assistant professor at the University of St. Thomas. His Ph.D. is in historical theology from Fordham University. The 2013 winner of the Novak Prize, his book, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, co-edited with Jessica Hooten Wilson, is forthcoming this fall. He is a senior contributor at The Imaginative Conservative and has written over 300 articles and reviews in a wide variety of books and popular and scholarly journals including: America, First Things, Journal of Markets & Morality, Library of Law and Liberty, National Review, Nova et Vetera, and the Wall Street Journal.

Co-sponsors for this event include Hope College’s departments of History, Political Science, and Religion, and the Tocqueville Forum.