Signposts to Freedom

Book excerpt: In this book, Lochman presents an ethic illuminated by the Ten Commandments. In wrestling to discover the meaning of human life, both individual and social, his deepest concern has been with freedom under the law. Lochman points out that no human society, however well equipped technologically, can exist without a moral basis, without convictions that are more than mere opportunism, pragmatism, and calculated self-interest. This moral basis is provided by the Ten Commandments, the Magna Charta of freedom.Lochman discusses current problem areas of personal, sexual, and social ethics: worship of false gods, anxiety, the work ethic and the cult of success, murder, terrorism, suicide, abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, war, the new morality, and new understandings of shared life in marriage.