David Walsh’s The Sacramentality of the Person

Abstract David Walsh’s The Priority of the Person is a collection of essays that could have been entitled The Sacramentality of the Person. This review highlights the quality of sacredness that is pervasive explored throughout the book. Walsh, in reflections upon significant political, philosophical, and historical thinkers and topics, presents the person in his or her absolute, ineffable, inviolable value. Since the significance of personhood is discussed as the occasion of transcendence, we argue that The Priority of the Person effectively reveals a horizon of sacramentality in which it is the person who, by virtue of his or her very existence, makes present the hidden, but always emergent, quality of sacredness in our midst.