'Sacramentality' can serve as a category that helps to understand the performative power of religious and legal rituals. Through the analysis of 'sacraments', we can observe how law uses sacramentality to change reality through performative action, and how religion uses law to organise religious rituals, including sacraments. The study of sacramental action thus shows how law and religion intertwine to produce legal, spiritual, and other social effects. In this volume, Judith Hahn explores this interplay by interpreting the Catholic sacraments as examples of sacro-legal symbols that draw on the sacramental functioning of the law to provide both spiritual and legal goods to church members. By focusing on sacro-legal symbols from the perspective of sacramental theology, legal studies, ritual theory, symbol theory, and speech act theory, Hahn's  study reveals how law and religion work hand in hand to shape our social reality.

‘This is high-level philosophy, history, and anthropology and it will be a deeply interesting read for scholars in those disciplines … Recommended.’

J. Sienkiewicz Source: CHOICE

‘This excellent work of scholarship makes one central and striking claim: that there is an intimate link between legal ‘ritual’ and religious ‘ritual’. … It's not just that Hahn is perfectly qualified - as a Professor of Canon Law - to make this argument; it's also that - in the care taken and detailed exposition of the central claim - there is an evident delight.’

Oliver Wright Source: The Heythrop Journal