I am on annual leave, I am reading Javier Cercas' beautiful book on his trip to Mongolia with Pope Francis, and I am obviously thinking myself about how I teach law and religion (and, by the way, if the word “religion” makes you think only of incense smoke, Gregorian chants, or the big scary abstractions in comparative theology textbooks, you’re already missing the point): it’s not just one of those optional “modules” in the human-civilisation syllabus. It’s more like the deep slow-moving tectonic plate under the entire legal landscape, the one that explains why certain laws feel natural and others feel like the bureaucratic equivalent of being forced to wear someone else’s shoes. Some colleagues tend to pretend (or think, which is rather dangerous) that law is self-propelling—sui generis—as if its origins are purely in rational deliberation among formally equal actors. (They’re not.) In fact, legal systems have been marinated for centuries in the moral imaginaries of religious tra...