John Rawls’s A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith

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A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith

John Rawls

A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith John Rawls Ed. Thomas Nagel, with commentaries by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel, and by Robert Merrihew Adams. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Nicholas Wolterstorff received his A.B. from Calvin College in 1953 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1956. After teaching philosophy for two years at Yale, he returned to the philosophy department at his alma mater in 1959. He returned to Yale in 1989, where he was a member of the Divinity School, the Philosophy Department, and the Religious Studies Department. He has taught during leaves of absence at Haverford College, the University of Michigan, Princeton University, the University of Texas, Notre Dame University, and the Free University of Amsterdam. He retired from teaching at the end of 2001 and is Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

A Brief Inquiry is the undergraduate senior thesis that John Rawls submitted to the Princeton Philosophy Department in December 1942. We owe its discovery to Eric Gregory, member of Princeton’s Religion Department, who came across it one day when browsing through the card catalog of the Princeton library for senior theses by famous Princeton alumni. The title intrigued him, so he asked to see it. He discerned its significance at once. It’s an essay in Christian ethics written by the same person whose later publications made him the most famous and influential political philosopher of our generation. Rawls has usually been interpreted as a purely secular philosopher who tolerated religion but had no interest in it. Both those who applaud and those who criticize Rawls as so interpreted will now have to take account of the intensely religious Rawls of A Brief Inquiry.

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Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 12.1 (Spring 2010). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.

Emotional Control / Spring 2010 / Book Reviews

John Rawls’s A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith

Nicholas Wolterstorff

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