The owner of a tiny house, while living intimately indoors, has a larger life outside, and a lighter conscience.
What he commended in the poet Marina Tsvetaeva – "the good force of creative mind at work in the light of conscience" – can be commended in him too.
In a letter he reflected that this had nothing to do with his (black) skin-colour, and more to do with a mood of shame: "The only plea they offer is that while they are here acting against Light and Conscience they dare not come to that holy Table".An essay that matteredThis sense of guilt was to prove the Achilles heel of the slave trade in Europe.
He was most committed to a wide measure of religious liberty - there was a state church under Cromwell, but no-one was required to attend it, and almost everyone, Catholics and Jews included, was allowed to worship privately in the light of conscience.
Shore is the author of four books focused on social change, including "Revolution of the Heart" (Riverhead Press, 1995), "The Cathedral Within" (Random House, 1999), "The Light of Conscience" (Random House, 2004) and most recently, "The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men" (PublicAffairs, 2010).
But lighting the spark of conscience needs brave individuals like Thomas Clarkson, the moving spirit behind the founding of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of Slavery in 1787.
"The light of his conscience has gone out".
One day, Mohsen, caught up in mob hysteria, finds himself casting stones at a prostitute's head, "the light of his conscience" gone out.
If the Stephen Lawrence inquiry shone a light on the conscience of the nation, Dr Richard Stone, perhaps the most vociferous of the advisers who assisted Sir William Macpherson, was the conscience of the inquiry itself.
Khadra's prose is gentle and precise, but the violent climax of the book makes a powerful point about what can happen to a man when "the light of his conscience has gone out".
I believe that for the people of Burma and Iran and Sudan and anywhere where darkness prevails for a time and inflicts its terrible miseries on the innocent, before the light of human conscience extinguishes it forever.
