On the Altar

Name: On the Altar
Price: 59.99 AUD
Availability: PreOrder
ISBN: 9780691190884

A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular

Jonathan Sheehan

$59.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

QTY:

English

Miscellaneous
01 June 2026

Religion & beliefs; History of religion; Christianity; Christian theology; Ancient religions & mythologies

How Christianity both abolished and absorbed sacrifice

From the beginning, sacrifice lived a double life in Christianity, both abandoned and essential. Christ's death on the cross was the sacrifice to end all sacrifice, eclipsing the temple sacrifices of Judaism and paganism. And yet at the centre of the lived faith was the repetition of sacrifice: the offering of Christ's body, the sacrifices of ancient patriarchs, and the sacrifices of martyrs woven through liturgy, theology, and popular devotion.

But this double life collapsed in the Reformation. Quarrelling heirs to Christian truth discovered that the sacrifices they once called Christian might be nothing of the sort. To build their new faiths

to discover the truth of Christian sacrifice

they turned to the past, learning from Christianity as it was how Christianity ought to be.

In On the Altar, Jonathan Sheehan offers a new account of sacrifice both sacred and secular. His story is in part a history of the Christian imagination across the centuries of the Reformation, when new martyrs and holy warriors fought for the truth of their sacrifices, when the empire of New World sacrifice was recruited to settle Christian conflicts, and when the sacrifices of the ancient Hebrews were weaponised for orthodoxy. But it is a history of the secular imagination as well, as the vast archive of Christian sacrifice was dispersed and applied to things that humans make, their religions, politics, and societies. With On the Altar, Sheehan reveals a new history of both Christianity and the secular world in which we still live.

By: Jonathan Sheehan
Imprint: Miscellaneous
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780691190884
ISBN 10: 0691190887
Pages: 608
Publication Date: 01 June 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Jonathan Sheehan is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of European History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture and the coauthor of Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century.

Reviews for On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular

""A magnificent work of scholarship. . . . The author’s breadth of learning and command of sources is a wonder. . . . Mr. Sheehan accomplishes here what might otherwise take hundreds of scholars to produce in a standard reference work. This is a major scholarly achievement.""---D.G. Hart, Wall Street Journal