"Don't Tread on Me!"  "Get off my lawn!"  "'Merica!"  We are a people obsessed with the idea of individual sovereignty and autonomy.  We are also consumers at our core and children of the Enlightenment who have come to believe that the ability to choose--regardless of the content of that choice--is the one great high good for which we are willing to live and die.  But what exactly is freedom?  And what has freedom meant in the past?  In this two-part series, Justin and I dive a little deeper into the history of the concept of freedom, beginning with some of its contemporary expressions and then moving backward in time to develop a genealogy that might help us better reflect, ultimately, on what we, as Christians, ought to understand when we read the words of St. Paul: "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery" (Gal. 5:1).