Well, gentlemen, ladies, I'm expected to introduce a conference on liberalism.

This is not an easy task, rather a tall order, for at least two reasons.

First, I am aware that the discussion is afoot among American thinkers,

mainly in the Catholic tradition, about the legitimacy of the conception

of freedom that underlies the foundation of this country. But I'm afraid that for reasons

of time and place, I could not access the main documents of this controversy. Therefore,

I will leave it aside, at least for the time being.

Second, the very word liberalism is so dreadfully ambiguous that it uses misleading

as long as we don't come clean about the meaning in which we take it in a definite context. I therefore chose to ponder

it while on the very notion of freedom. This provides me with an opportunity to come back

to a meditation on freedom of which the present talk will constitute a third part, the first two parts I wrote in some sort of English.

The first lecture was published in a collective work on Christianity and Freedom two years ago.

The second one will see the light of day in a book of mine by a title of Curing Mad Truths

scheduled to be published this fall.

Let me have very briefly summarized the results I claim to have obtained up to now.

In the first essay, I endeavored to show that the idea of freedom strikes its roots not only in the Greek tradition, let us say in shorthand Athens, but in the biblical tradition in Jerusalem.

It does that not so much at the social and political level, but rather at the highest point that we can possibly imagine, or the roots are above,

i.e. in the relationship between God and his creatures. The biblical God is the one who sets free his people from the Egyptian bondage

and introduces it into an ethics of freedom. The alleged ten commandments of the Decollo

are in fact meant to preserve the freedom of the newly liberated people from the temptation

of falling back into slavery. In the second essay, I endeavored to supplement the first

widening of perspective, which is historical in nature, with a second broadening more philosophical.

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