Kwame Anthony Appiah has a fascinating essay in the December 9 edition of The New York Review of Books. In it, he reviews A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, a Harvard philosophy student’s senior thesis, written in 1942, that would never have merited publication if that student, John Rawls, had not gone on to write, in Appiah’s estimation, “the most influential work of liberal political philosophy of the twentieth century.” We discover that the great liberal philosopher began the life of a mind as a religious thinker who self-consciously molded his theories on the neo-orthodoxy of Read more