Family Conscience: A Memoir of Four Generations

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.

John D. Barbour is Professor of Religion and Boldt Distinguished Teaching Chair in the Humanities at St. Olaf College. He is the author of scholarly essays and four books, including Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith (1994) and The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography (2004).