There are many facts which seem to be routinely “lost”: we know them, but we forget that we know them until we are reminded of them. That Richard Rorty’s grandfather was the quintessential Social Gospeler Walter Rauschenbusch is one of those facts, in part because Rorty seems to exist at such a great distance from Rauschenbusch, both chronologically—is the Progressive Era really only that long ago?—and ideologically: while not a Dawkins-like secularist, Rorty’s avowed secularism was such a fundamental part of his philosophy and his public life that we may have trouble seeing him as the grandson of a person Read more