The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID‐19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.

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Scholars of religion sometimes argue that a distinctively modern conception of religion takes religion to be a trans‐cultural category, divisible into “true” and “false” versions, of which Christianity is the core type. Thus, according to the so‐called modern conception of religion, every culture has its own religion. Some are true (paradigmatically Christianity), some are false. This paper argues that these ideas were present in Lactantius's (c. 250–325) conception of religio. It shows this by presenting Lactantius's development of a theory of religio. This theory was the product of Lactantius combining one Ciceronian conception of religio and a Christian origin‐story about where religio comes from. Lactantius used this theory to analyse Christianity and what he took to be its competitors.

Robert Adams’s account of divine command theory argues that moral obligations are idealized versions of everyday social requirements. One type of social requirement is the ordinary demand one person makes of one another. Its idealized version is the perfect command a perfect God makes of those he loves. This paper extends Adams’s account of moral obligation by considering another kind of social requirement: promises. It argues that we can understand a divine covenant as an idealized version of a promise. Promisers take on social requirements to promisees when they make promises. Analogously, God takes on obligations to humans when God makes covenants with them. Divine command theorists might fear that this makes God subject to moral rules not of his own choosing. This paper considers these fears and argues that they are unwarranted.

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