On Cultivating Liberty, a collection of essays by theologian Michael Novak, is divided into three sections. The first, Liberty: The Virtue and the Institutions, collects several of Novak's most important essays on the free society, written over the past decade and a half. The section moves from the foundations of liberty (chapters one and two) to specific historical and institutional questions of the free society (chapters three through five) and concludes with a meditation on the family, which is for Novak a school of practical wisdom and a fierce enemy to all projects to engineer the human soul.

The second section, Liberty: The Tradition and Some of Its Heroes, is a look at some of the most profound theorists of freedom: Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, Irving Kristol, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and John Paul II.

The third section is an afterword containing the intellectual autobiography "Errand into the Wilderness," which traces Novak's disaffection with the Left, his immersion in political economy, and his understanding of his work. In addition, the volume contains a "Readers' Guide" to Novak's major writings. [More...]

Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at AEI.