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Bound to be Free: Evangelical and Catholic Engagements in Ecclesiology, Ethics, and

Ecumenism. By Reinhard Hütter. Pp. x + 313. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004.

ISBN 0 8028 2750 0. Paper n.p.

Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective. By David Burrell. Pp. xxii + 266. Oxford:

Blackwell, 2004. ISBN 1 4051 2171 8. Paper, 19.99.

These two books—one by a philosopher well-versed in theology, the other by a theologian at

home with philosophy—undertake a theological challenge to a number of settled assumptions

about the nature of freedom. With attention to the current socio-political context, including the

American missionary-like export of “freedom” as a divine mission, as well as the general

triumph of liberal capitalist accounts of freedom, both Hütter and Burrell mine the riches of the

catholic theological tradition in order to re-articulate what we might describe as a broadly

Augustinian account of freedom as an alternative to the regnant paradigm.

Burrell provides a diagnosis of the modern condition in this respect: having unduly

limited freedom to “choosing,” a globalized capitalist culture comes to value choice as an end in

itself, “with little or no attention to its telos” (vii). As a result, modern culture is able to think

freedom only as “libertarian;” freedom becomes identified with autonomy and the free human

agent takes on the role of a parallel creator ex nihilo.