It Takes a Daily Effort to Be Free

For Scranton, “The choice is a clear one”: We can get “more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.”

Womanist theologian Emilie Townes beautifully shares the fullness of liberation as a process. In her article “Ethics as an Art of Doing the Work Our Souls Must Have” that appears in the anthology Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, she speaks about how distinct liberation and freedom are: “An important distinction must be made: liberation and fr

For Scranton, “The choice is a clear one”: We can get “more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.”

as long as our freedom is dependent upon stuff we can’t really control, then it’s not really freedom, is it?

“Men are not free,” he wrote, “if dependent industrially on the arbitrary will of another.” Economic security was a foundation on which one could really be free in a meaningful sense—hence the importance of steady but not oppressive work, of education, time and space for leisure, parks, libraries, and other institutions.