Law, spirituality, and politics are usually treated as separate rooms in a house, with the doors kept firmly shut. Law is seen as a secular religion, politics as a place with no room for grace, and any mixing of the three as suspect. But what if the doors were opened? What if law, spirituality, and politics could work together to help create a more just and peaceful world? Those who hold this vision believe that people, at their core, want to live in a world where each person’s humanity is recognized, and that law can both foster and be guided by empathy, compassion, and mutual understanding. Justice can be about more than getting even. It can be about healing the broken relationships at the heart of so much conflict.

The Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics (PISLAP, pronounced “pie-slap”) is a nationwide network of lawyers, law professors, law students, legal workers, and others building a spiritually informed approach to law and social change. Its guiding principles include love, compassion, connection, trust, mutuality, social justice, restoration, healing, and deep listening.

PISLAP grew out of the Politics of Meaning movement led by the late Peter Gabel and the late Rabbi Michael Lerner. At the first Politics of Meaning conference in Washington, D.C., in 1996, a small group of lawyers gathered to bring this vision into the legal world. Led by Gabel and Nanette Schorr, that group became PISLAP. Its founders argue that our legal system is built on a competitive, individualistic view of human nature that denies how deeply connected we are. Their mission is to transform legal culture so that law becomes a vehicle for a more loving and caring world.

PISLAP’s work has focused on transforming legal education, the lawyer-client relationship, and the practice of law itself. Judges, practitioners, professors, students, activists, and spiritual leaders work together to strengthen law as a helping profession rather than a purely adversarial one. PISLAP sees itself as part of a family of related movements, including restorative justice, collaborative law, and humanizing legal education.

A sister organization, the Network of Spiritual Progressives, was founded in 2005 by Rabbi Michael Lerner, Sister Joan Chittister, and Professor Cornel West. It works to bring spirituality, empathy, and love into politics, building a movement that puts the wellbeing of people and the planet ahead of money, power, and profit.

At the simplest level, spirituality is about care for the human spirit, politics is about relationships and governance, and law is about rules and structure. Bringing them together means building a society less focused on material things and more focused on each other. We’re only here for a limited time, so why not use the tools we have to make that time beautiful for as many people as we can?