Liberation and freedom are not the same. Liberation is a process. Freedom is a temporary state of being. It is more of an event we point toward, work for, and hope for…. It is the hope of freedom that drives liberation.
Liberation is the product of freedom… Liberation is the process of struggle with ourselves and with each other that begets the transformation of all of us to our full humanity... Through liberation, freedom may be made manifest, but that freedom is not a permanent state of being. When we are made whole, we are asked to give of that wholeness... Liberation is dynamic. It never ends.
From “Ethics as an Art of Doing the Work Our Souls Must Have” by Emilie M. Townes (p. 41), published in Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, Eds. Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie M. Townes, and Angela D. Sims.