Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey

At this critical moment in our nation's-and the world's-history, we are called sharply but lovingly to think in new ways about our moral and political behavior 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.