October 20, 2026
We make our plans, earn our living, build our homes, and call it freedom. We have choices. We have comforts. We have responsibilities that keep us too busy to examine the arrangement. So how much of our lives do we actually control—and how would we know if we had learned to live quite happily within somebody else’s boundaries?
Returning to Caravan to Midnight after nine years, author Larry Kelley joins John B. Wells to explore his historical novel, An American Slave in Barbary: The Odyssey of Winston Prescott Jones, and its connection to Lessons from Fallen Civilizations. A young American’s voyage into the Mediterranean becomes a struggle for survival in a world of pirates, palaces, tribute, and power. As his circumstances change, the meaning of freedom becomes increasingly difficult to separate from everything he stands to lose.
Behind the adventure lies a predicament familiar enough to make us uncomfortable: a person can gain status, security, and a place in the world while remaining subject to another’s will. When the arrangement begins to feel normal, even desirable, the desire to leave becomes complicated.
From the ambitions of empires to the private bargains we make to get through another day, tonight’s conversation follows a question that reaches well beyond the pages of a novel: would we recognize our own captivity?
Free to obey. And accustomed to calling it liberty.