Conscience and Selfhood: Thomas More,John Henry Newman,and the Crisis of the Postmodern Subject

Abstract

Both Thomas More and John Henry Newman understood the human subject as a historically situated, responsible, and dynamic being that realizes itself through conscientious moral action amid the ambiguities of history. Both men were also obliged to come to terms with the tensile relationship between loyalty to conscience and loyalty to tradition. Their lives and their work would seem to resonate with, and constitute a challenge to, the contemporary postmodern debate about the nature of selfhood.