In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Christopher Shea profiles Harvard political scientist Michael Sandel, whose immensely popular seminar Moral Reasoning 22—known to initiates simply as “Justice”—forms the basis of a 12-part documentary set to air on public-television this fall.
Sandel himself is a strong critic of Rawlsian liberalism, which he sees as “a hollow view of the world, one that refuses to take up discussions of the best way to live.” One way to encourage such weighty discussions, he contends, would be to construct “‘a more faith-friendly idea of public reason'”:
“Martin Luther King drew explicitly on Christian themes,” Sandel says. “The ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail,’ which is one of the great documents of the civil-rights movement, drew explicitly on his Christian faith. I don’t think that makes it a less valuable contribution to public life than secular arguments against segregation.”
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