About the book
Of Freedom and God, Jeremi Slak and Jason Blake’s translation of essays by Marjan Rožanc, contains a selection of essays from the 1995 collection O svobodi in bogu (Of Freedom and God) that Andrej Inkret put together and edited. Left out of the English translation are primarily those essays that are very local in nature; the red thread of the essays included in the English translation show a “European dimension” and an openness to the broader spiritual and literary space which at the same time is always realized in the most intimate and narrow of surroundings. As Andrej Inkret writes in his afterword to the collection: “from the very first texts, [Rožanc’s essays] are based on questioning any apodictic, purely rationalistic answers. Moreover, Rožanc’s essays are even derived from the thought that new-age man, with his unique, inimitable personal individuality as well as his socio-political being, is placed into an open, free, uncertain world in which there are no longer, and no longer can be, any more a priori, self-understood and unambiguous ‘transcendent’ values that might, from the outset, afford man a firm point of reference, thought or, for example, a home.”
Original title: O svobodi in Bogu
Edited by: Tanja Petrič
Afterword: Andrej Inkret
ISBN: 978-961-6547-86-4
Pages: 169
Price: 19,00 EUR
About the translators
From the press
Rožanc offers ideologically impartial and consistent contemplation on the significance of individual freedom for the existential fulfilment of the human being. He puts forth the ardent argument that genuine empathy or morality – and with these the advancement of human consciousness – can only arise from the volition of the individual, as opposed to from the mechanisms of social conditioning or religious imperative. Rožanc reveals these and other external moral levers to be contrived, providing strong support for the fundamental importance of free choice in the search for existential meaning and a more just society.
Jeremi Slak, translator
