John Rawls never published anything about his own religious beliefs, but after his death two texts were discovered which shed light on the subject. The present volume includes these two texts, together with an Introduction that discusses their relation to Rawls’s published work, and an essay that places them theological context.

It has been said that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Drawing on this notion, Stories of a Recovering Fundamentalist: Understanding and Responding to Christian Absolutism recounts the author’s journey as a member of the fundamentalist subculture as a child and his life among the Jesus Freaks (Jesus Movement)-- a congregation of deserters from the hippie drug culture of the late 1960's and early 1970's. This movement, though of great importance in the culture of the times, now largely goes unrecognized--although the Jesus Movement provided the cover stories for many prominent secular magazines chronicling the youth culture of the late 60's and early 70's. While, not devoted to a history of the Jesus Movement, the book does a service in bringing a discussion of the Jesus Freak phenomenon to the attention of today's readers. The book goes on to recount the author's eventual abandonment of fundamentalism. As the story unfolds, critical research related to the psychology, sociology, and history of the subculture provides a framework for understanding Christian fundamentalism. Stories of a Recovering Fundamentalist recounts a gripping personal pilgrimage—at times both humorous and painful— that is rooted in honest reflection and informed by theory and research. It offers worthwhile reading for mainline Christians, curious evangelicals, recovering fundamentalists or anyone wanting to understand this timely topic.

John Rawls's influential theory of justice and public reason has often been thought to exclude religion from politics, out of fear of its illiberal and destabilizing potentials. It has therefore been criticized by defenders of religion for marginalizing and alienating the wealth of religious sensibilities, voices, and demands now present in contemporary liberal societies. In this anthology, established scholars of Rawls and the philosophy of religion reexamine and rearticulate the central tenets of Rawls's theory to show they in fact offer sophisticated resources for accommodating and responding to religions in liberal political life. The chapters reassert the subtlety, openness, and flexibility of his sense of liberal "respect" and "consensus," revealing their inclusive implications for religious citizens. They also explore the means he proposes for accommodating nonliberal religions in liberal politics, developing his conception of "public reason" into a novel account of the possibilities for rational engagement between liberal and religious ideas. And they reevaluate Rawls's liberalism from the "transcendent" perspectives of religions themselves, critically considering its normative and political value, as well as its own "religious" character. Rawls and Religion makes a unique and important contribution to contemporary debates over liberalism and its response to the proliferation of religions in contemporary political life.

This volume brings together ten of Paul Weithman's papers on John Rawls's liberalism and his defense of reasonable political faith.

One Bible, Many Answers In God's Problem, the New York Times bestselling author of Misquoting Jesus challenges the contradictory biblical explanations for why an all-powerful God allows us to suffer.