Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey. Questo articolo non è disponibile.Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey

A Profound and Stirring Call to Action in Our Troubled Worldfrom One of America's Great Religious Leaders

"Conscience may be understood as the hidden inner compass that guides our lives and must be searched for and recovered repeatedly. At no time more than our own is this need to retrieve the shards of broken conscience more urgent."
from the Introduction

This clarion call to rethink our moral and political behavior examines the idea of conscience and the role conscience plays in our relationships to government, law, ethics, religion, human nature and Godand to each other. From Abraham to Abu Ghraib, from the dissenting prophets to Darfur, Rabbi Harold Schulweis probes history, the Bible and the works of contemporary thinkers for ideas about both critical disobedience and uncritical obedience. He illuminates the potential for evil and the potential for good that rests within us as individuals and as a society.

By questioning religion's capacityand willto break from mindless conformity, Rabbi Schulweis challenges us to counter our current suppressive culture of obedience with the culture of moral compassion, and to fulfill religion's obligation to make room for and carry out courageous moral dissent.

At this critical moment in the world's history, we are called sharply but lovingly to think in new ways about our moral and political behaviour by Harold Schulweis, one of America's great spiritual leaders. Like the biblical prophets, he speaks to people of all faiths, all backgrounds in this call for renewal of conscience. "The urgent challenge for religion is to provide religious groups with the resources needed to resist immoral authority. Religion is morally obligated to instill the sanctity of conscience that may balance the culture of obedience with the culture of moral disobedience. Organized religion appears unable to envision the interdependent coexistence of obedience and disobedience, a time to obey and a time to disobey." A provocative book, it examines the idea of conscience and the role conscience plays in our relationships to law, ethics, religion, human nature and God - and to each other. From Abraham to Abu Ghraib, from the dissenting prophets to Darfur, he probes history, the Bible and the works of contemporary thinkers for ideas about both critical disobedience and uncritical obedience, illuminating the potential for evil and the potential for good that rests within us as individuals and as a society.