On the Altar, with Jonathan Sheehan

Does Christianity reject sacrifice, or require it? Is sacrifice its heart, or a corruption that stole in while no one was looking? Is Christ the end of sacrifice, or its beginning? Such questions have roiled the church since its earliest days.

In this episode, Sam chats with Jonathan Sheehan, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of European History at the University of California, Berkeley, about his important study, On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular (Princeton University Press, 2026).

[Full disclosure — this book is dense . For a good overview, see D.G. Hart's review at the Wall Street Journal. There's a paywall but the reader willing to hand over her email can read for free.]

By focusing on the history of sacrifice in the history of the Latin West, Sheehan shows how secularism fails to live up to its promise of autonomy, since it owes many of its normative commitments to the Christianity from which it emerged. Like Christianity (which however does not claim autonomy from human truths and histories but rather to offer them fulfillment in Christ), secularism is subject to what Sheehan calls heteronomy—subordination to forces beyond its control.

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Credits

This episode's cover art is The Mass of Saint Gregory by Albrecht Dürer (public domain). Music licensed through Soundstripe.
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