In an age of communicative media, free speech appears to be ubiquitous. Anyone can say anything in any of a hundred social media apps that can go viral worldwide in an instant throughout all of them. And this opens the thoughts of anyone to the commentary of anyone else. But are there limits on free speech in a global world? How is our freedom of speech bound by legal, ethical, and content restrictions? In what way is our freedom really free? Presenters from the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Australia join with a Canadian moderator to walk us through some considerations on what it means to speak freely in the modern world.

Lawrence Hopperton (ret.) was the founding director of distributed learning at Tyndale University in Toronto, Canada. He has published extensively on the theory and practice of online learning and won an international award for instructional design and disability compliance. He has also published four textbooks on writing skills, two chapbooks of poetry, and a full collection, Table for Three, through En Route Books and Media, which also published three of his chapters concerning disability compliance in a book entitled Teaching and Learning in the Age of Covid-19. His next book of poetry, Such Common Stories, will be released by En Route later this year.

Rachel Fischer is a researcher and information ethicist who collaborates with academic institutions, civil society organisations and intergovernmental entities. She is the Co-Chair of the International Centre for Information Ethics, Deputy Editor for the International Review of Information Ethics and member of UNESCO IFAP’s Working Group on Information Accessibility. Rachel was an editor and one of the authors for the Nelson Mandela Reader on Information Ethics which was released in 2021. Learn more about this reader at https://www.i-c-i-e.org/publications.

Francis Etheredge is a Catholic married layman, with eleven children, three of whom he hopes are in heaven and the rest of whom are alive and well and stepping through life’s stages of school, university, and career. In the last seven years, he has returned to being a self-employed writer, adding twelve books to one already published. Find his books on bioethics at En Route Books and Media. The Human Person: A Bioethical Word, Conception: An Icon of the Beginning, Mary and Bioethics: An Exploration, The ABCQ of Conceiving Conception, and Reaching for the Resurrection: A Pastoral Bioethics. Forthcoming later in 2022 is his new book, Human Nature: Moral Norm.

Peter Breen is a defamation and media lawyer and former member of state parliament in Australia. He is the author of several books including his latest book, Prodigal Pilgrim Letters to Pope Francis from Lourdes, Fatima, Garabandal and Medjugorje. Coming in July 2022, his book Dear Mr. Putin will be published by En Route Books and Media. In this book, Peter expresses outrage at the unprovoked attack on the Ukrainian people, at the same time placing the war in a religious context, with the prospect that its outcome may be the historical events prophesied at Fatima in 1917.

https://faithscience.org/free-speech/