The event is an official launch of the recently published open access book by Judith Hahn, "The Cultures of Canon Law: Global Catholicism, Glocal Legislation, and the Local Churches" (Law and Religion in a Global Context 6), Cham, Springer Nature, 2026.
The responses will be offered by:
Michel Chambon, who is a cultural anthropologist and theologian specialised in the study of Christianity in Contemporary China. Since 2021, he is a research fellow at the National University of Singapore where he leads the Initiative for the Study of Asian Catholics ISAC.
Elizabeth Ong, who is a civil and canon lawyer from the Diocese of Christchurch, New Zealand. She is also an accredited Certified Information Privacy Manager with the IAPP and serves as the National Privacy Officer, Lay Judge and Tribunal In-House Solicitor for the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference. Elizabeth is currently completing her Doctorate in Canon Law at Saint Paul University, Ottawa specialising in Privacy and Data Protection in relation to Canon Law.
About the book: This book is the first study to consider findings from sociology, legal anthropology, ethnology, legal pluralism, comparative law and theology in order to gain a better understanding of the diverse cultures of global Catholicism and the cross-cultural challenges arising from Roman Catholic canon law within the local churches. The author, renowned for her work at the intersection of socio-legal studies and canon law, examines the latter as a distinctive example of a European religious legal system that cuts across the myriad legal cultures of the local churches. In light of findings on legal transfer and legal colonialism, and by examining canon law within the emerging field of social and cultural studies approaches to law, her book sheds light on how canon law is imposed upon and received by the local churches around the world. It analyses the challenges and problems arising from the law’s transcultural claims within these churches. Based on these observations, the study discusses the critical stance of canon law within contemporary Catholicism and the current debates on a synodal reform of the church and its law.
The project was funded by VolkswagenStiftung as part of their Opus Magnum funding scheme 2024/2025.
About the author: Judith Hahn serves as Professor of Canon Law at the Faculty of Catholic Theology, Bonn University (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn). She is a McDonald Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Thomas More Law School, Australian Catholic University, the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, and a Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study of “Law as Culture” in Bonn. She has published extensively on the theory and sociology of canon law and on the status of religious law in modern societies. Her work in the area of law and religion extends to a variety of topics that examine both legal aspects and theological problems of law and religion from a cultural and social studies perspective.