Conscience

My friend, Pastor Fraser Pearce, has a very interesting piece on conscience on his blog. I've been mulling it over this week, and frankly I find the idea rather troubling, especially around the idea of a badly formed conscience, and the implications of acting according to that.

Last night I was listening to a different podcast about the impact and aftermath of Barack Obama's speech on race. The commentators posited that the politically expedient thing to do for Obama was to put some distance between himself and his pastor to try to stamp out the controversy and to limit the political damage.

What strikes me (other than the power of the speech as a whole) is that by not doing that, he perhaps demonstrated conscience as it works best - whether that's a good conscience or a badly formed one. Acting in conscience implies, and embraces risk. Time will tell whether Obama's speech is a turning point in the 2008 US presidential elections, if it makes no difference at all, or if by bringing race to the dialogue he has ended his own chances of nomination. By taking the non-expedient option, by acting according to his conscience, he's brought the last option in to play.

As someone who struggles with risk (and perhaps conscience?) I admire him for that.