John D. Barbour is professor of religion emeritus at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he taught from 1982 to 2018 and served as Martin Marty Chair of Religion and the Academy and Boldt Chair in the Humanities. He wrote five scholarly books, most recently Journeys of Transformation (2022), as well as Renunciation: A Novel (Resource Publications, 2013).
This memoir explores the role of conscience in four generations during a century of family history. It begins with the suicide of Barbour's maternal grandfather and the impact of this traumatic event. Later chapters describe his interactions with other grandparents, parents, two uncles, siblings, a former spouse, and two sons. Family Conscience depicts the values and patterns of self-assessment that members of this family share and also the ways their differing moral views have been influenced by interactions with one another. Barbour interprets how he and family members have understood work and vocation, religious commitments, political and economic values, choices about marriage and raising children, conflicts within the family, and other situations and issues. This thematic family memoir blends the genres of biography, oral interview, autobiography, essay, and cultural history as Barbour depicts how conscience was transmitted and transformed through the generations.
“Family Conscience is an extraordinary memoir. Tracing the various manifestations of conscience in his Protestant Midwestern family over several generations, Barbour illuminates the way in which ‘family values,’ whether adopted or resisted, can persist and shape behavior for decades. At the same time, his
book is an acute inquiry into—and demonstration of—the ethics of writing about one’s relatives. It is an impressive achievement.”
—G. THOMAS COUSER, Professor Emeritus of English, Hofstra University
“The unexamined life is not worth living’—so said Socrates. In Family Conscience, John D. Barbour re-examines several of his long-standing intellectual concerns—solitude, ethics, spirituality and its precarity—in light of his most intimate personal relations. The nature and challenges of conscience hold his narrative together, and the result is a memoir that draws readers deeply into personal reflection on the meaning of their own lives and those of others. Socrates would approve.”
—CRAIG HOWES, Professor of English, University of Hawaii
“Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Family Conscience provides a genealogy of the values of four generations of an accomplished and morally aspiring clan. As honest as it is tender, Barbour’s study is rife with illuminating reflections on the nature of conscience considered as an amalgam of reason, desire, and history. Life’s moral complexity is brought home with engaging stories and the author’s willingness to give voice to relatives with conflicting perspectives on family history.”
—GORDON MARINO, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, St. Olaf College
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