Os Guinness - A Free Peoples Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

Sometimes a book is so important and so timely that not to have read it is to embarrass oneself. This is such a book. Its message is so crucial and so clear that all Americans are obligated to read it and have a national conversation on its themes. No cultural commentator or politician who has not read this book should ever be taken seriously again. Let this book be the new litmus test. If you are serious about America, be familiar with its themes and expect to discuss them and to be tested on them. Rest assured that you will be, because America is now herself being tested on them. Alas, we will not be graded on a curve. This books clarion call is both piercing and full of hope. May God help us to hear it and to take action.

Eric Metaxas , New York Times best-selling author of Bonhoeffer:
Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy and Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce
and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

Os Guinness enlightens, cheers, chastises and informs with this latest contribution to our civic discourse. Guinness here solidifies his reputation as one of the most nimble voices from the Christian community as he surveys our history and our present with appreciation as well as deep concern. Highly recommended for all interested citizens, whatever their political or faith commitments.

Jean Bethke Elshtain , Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor
of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago,
author of Sovereignty: God, State and Self

With passion and urgency Os Guinness gives a sweeping historical account of Americas past and her prospects for the future. He urges us to pay serious attention to a deeper understanding of freedom and makes a compelling case for why freedom requires virtue. Weaving together a wide-ranging knowledge of classical, constitutional and contemporary history, Guinness warns of Americas decline but charts a course for Americas renewal. It is a straight-shooting and sober volume, yet in the end it is a hopeful book.

Michael Cromartie , vice president, Ethics and
Public Policy Center, Washington, D.C.

In a passionate work that blends historical-cultural analysis with moral exhortation, Os Guinness finds at the heart of Americas culture wars something different than what many observers have seen there. He identifies a freedom war, a struggle over the very concept of freedom itself, in which a new and open-ended sense of the term threatens to engulf all older meanings. As the Founders well understood, it is not enough for Americans to invoke endlessly the name of freedom when they no longer agree as to what it means, and particularly when they have lost an understanding of the preconditions of freedom, as well as the ends freedom is meant to serve. Guinness warns that freedom cannot long endure unless it is consecrated to purposes beyond itself. It is a warning worth heeding.

Wilfred M. McClay , SunTrust Chair of Excellence in Humanities, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America

A Free Peoples Suicide is an inside view from the outside. Os Guinness has a clear eye, a quick mind, a profound grasp of political philosophy and an eloquent pen. His analysis of American freedom, what it has been, now is and is likely to become, is a clarion call for renewal of the Founders vision for a free people.

James W. Sire , author of The Universe Next Door and Vclav Havel:
The Intellectual Conscience of International Politics