Journal of Religious Ethics 35 (2):179-206 (2007)
Abstract |
This paper examines a remarkable document that has escaped critical attention within the vast literature on John Rawls, religion, and liberalism: Rawls's undergraduate thesis, "A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community" (1942). The thesis shows the extent to which a once regnant version of Protestant theology has retreated into seminaries and divinity schools where it now also meets resistance. Ironically, the young Rawls rejected social contract liberalism for reasons that anticipate many of the claims later made against him by secular and religious critics. The thesis and Rawls's late unpublished remarks on religion and World War II offer a new dimension to his intellectual biography. They show the significance of his humanist response to the moral impossibility of political theology. Moreover, they also reveal a kind of Rawlsian piety marginalized by contemporary debates over religion and liberalism
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Keywords | public reason community religion liberalism political theology John Rawls |
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DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9795.2007.00303.x |
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References found in this work BETA
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.Michael Sandel - 2003 - In Derek Matravers & Jonathan E. Pike (eds.), Journal of Philosophy. Routledge, in Association with the Open University. pp. 336-343.
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Citations of this work BETA
To the Mountaintop Again: The Early Rawls and Post-Protestant Ethics in Postwar America.P. Mackenzie Bok - 2017 - Modern Intellectual History 14 (1):153-185.
Religion and Women’s Rights: Susan Moller Okin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Multiple Feminist Liberal Traditions.Eileen Hunt Botting & Ariana Zlioba - 2018 - History of European Ideas 44 (8):1169-1188.
Ideal Theory After Auschwitz? The Practical Uses and Ideological Abuses of Political Theory as Reconciliation.Benjamin McKean - 2017 - Journal of Politics 79 (4):1177-1190.
On John Rawls's a Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith.Paul Weithman - 2012 - Journal of Religious Ethics 40 (4):557-582.
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