Rethinking Law and Religion by Russell Sandberg

T here is a melancholy in beginnings, especially those which promised more than they delivered.The field of law and religion in the United Kingdom (UK), born (or rather reborn) at the turn of the millennium, was a hopeful response to the legislative incantation of the Human Rights Act 1998 and to the institutional gesture of specialized LLB and LLM courses.These were important and long-awaited signs, for those who cared to see them: the emergence of a legal consciousness that would finally take religion seriously, not as a footnote to constitutional history or a quaint residue of ecclesiastical law, but as a living and volatile form of social meaning.A field was to be established, mapped, legitimized.However, more than two decades on, the promised flourishing has not materialized.There are scholars, there is scholarship, but the discipline itself remains fugitive, its borders uncertain, its relevance too often questioned even by its own practitioners.It is this dissonance between the imagined potential and the muted reality that Russell Sandberg sets out to interrogate.Much more than a spectator to this history, Sandberg is one of its authors.His Law and Religion, published in 2011, was-and remainsone of the few coherent pedagogical attempts to frame the subject for