But when a poor man looks with envy at a rich man’s house, is it primarily because he wants the same moral worth or because he wants, well — the house? Jacob Phillips’ latest book, Obedience is Freedom, posits that our society is much poorer for this approach. For Dickens, good and evil could be found in any class, and his servant characters, like Sam Weller of The Pickwick Papers, were largely defined by their loyalty to their employers.

Freedom’s Penalties - Chronicles Freedom’s Penalties - Chronicles

Phillips shows that the antiquated notion of obedience to the moral law contains forgotten dimensions, which can be a source of freedom from these contemporary fetters. For all our choice, comfort, opportunity, and stimuli, today’s West is neither dynamic nor happy; perhaps, like Prometheus, we are being tortured for knowing too much. He argues that through adherence to premodern values, and by respecting established codes and rules of behavior, we can aspire to a “more enduring and genuine freedom than that offered by today’s self-fulfilment paradigm.He is right to show that fulfilling the duties imposed on you by a wider community creates a special kind of freedom. There is a well-meaning, though misleading, way of engendering respect through racial categorisations. To do this, he takes in everything from rave culture and Charles Dickens to hippyish protests against nuclear weapons and the hidden history of London’s outcasts. However, he does so not with the armour suit of a warrior but with the sensitivity of a profound thinker and with elegant and engaging prose.

Jacob Phillips - Catholic Profiles An Interview with Jacob Phillips - Catholic Profiles

Instead, Phillipsoffers a diagnosis of contemporary society, which emphasises“transience, optionality, re-invention” rather than “permanent, unconditional attachment like that of parent and child.An MA module entitled 'Reason and Revelation' was the most memorable bit - engaging in a close reading of texts by all the great masters of 19th and 20th century theology on the nature of revelation. He weaves into these conversations his own experiences and observations, thus presenting a book that is engaging, personal, and even moving at times. In this pensive and highly personal study, English theologian Jacob Phillips shows that Joachim had keener insight than his famous friend; he knew that too much freedom can often mean unhappiness.

Can our duties set us free? | Ben Sixsmith | The Critic Magazine

I'm the strategic lead, so I'm responsible for the direction of the centre, its overall performance, and less enjoyable stuff like staffing and budgets etc. We will rediscover our freedom not through blind submission, but by working out for ourselves, through debate and argument, what is worth obeying. These virtues are nonetheless indispensable threads in a web of reciprocity uniting individuals who would otherwise sheer off randomly into social outer space, occasionally as brilliantly as comets, but just as aimless and lonely.

The author’s mother, erstwhile Greenham idealist, developed senile dementia when Phillips was only 16 years old. The virtue of obedience is seen as outdated today, if not downright toxic - and yet, are we any freer than our forebears? It is surely unnecessary to say that Phillips is not against freedom per se, but rather against the particular kinds of freedoms fetishized today. This and other factors reduce culture to a “dangerous place steeped only in prejudice and hatred… fear and suffering” rather than the “source of unity” that it can—and should—be. The True and Only Heaven” is for people like him, and like he sings in his song; “It’s a damn shame what the World’s gotten to, for people like me, and people like you”.