New Books in Christian Studies

Something deep within you recognizes it–the instinct that sacrifice matters, that something must be offered, that violence and beauty are woven together in ways that mere reason cannot explain. You are not alone. Civilizations throughout history have felt it.

In Bloodshed and Blessing: Stories of Sacrifice from Ancient Altars to the Holy Mass (Sophia Institute Press, 2026), Fr. Dwight Longenecker takes you on a gripping journey through ten ancient cultures, from the Aztecs to the Vikings, in which blood sacrifice was not the mark of barbarism but the beating heart of an entire worldview. And then he asks the question that will stop you cold: What if they weren’t so different from us?

Well, they weren’t. And once you see this reality, you can’t unsee it. Fr. Longenecker shows you that the violence, resentment, and desperate longing for meaning surging through our culture today are the very same forces that once drove men to the altar of sacrifice. The difference is that we have largely forgotten the One True Sacrifice that puts them all into perspective.

The ancient peoples were our ancestors – not just biologically but spiritually. Their worldview, so seemingly foreign to us, echoes down through the ages into our own deepest longings and anxieties.

In a culture surging with resentment and a desperate hunger for meaning, Fr. Longenecker shows you how sacrifice has always been humanity’s answer–a way of channeling violence into something transcendent, of transforming chaos into communion.

The questions people were asking then are the same ones we are asking now. And the answer, it turns out, has been on the altar all along.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker was brought up an Evangelical, studied at fundamentalist Bob Jones University, and later was ordained as an Anglican priest in England. After ten years in the Anglican ministry as a curate, a chaplain at Cambridge, and a country parson, in 1995 Dwight was received into full communion with the Catholic Church. He has published in numerous religious magazines and papers in the UK, Ireland, and the USA, writing on film and theology, apologetics, Biblical commentary and Catholic culture.

Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, available here on the New Books Network and wherever podcasts are found.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

After mounting London’s outdoor pulpit known as St. Paul’s Cross on
8th December, 1588, Anthony Tyrrell found himself perched before a
skeptical audience. He stood in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral to
declare his recantation of Catholicism and return to England’s official
Protestant Church. The trouble was he had been there before – in January
of the same year, in fact – to do the same thing. On that occasion,
however, he had shocked on-lookers by delivering an anti-Protestant
tirade instead of his promised recantation. How could Tyrrell, a serial
convert, who eventually changed church affiliation as many as ten times,
overcome the doubts of his suspicious audience? Tyrrell and similar
converts who made multiple conversions understandably aroused suspicions
of hypocrisy that made the performative character of public recantation
troublingly evident. Yet as Holly Pickett argues in The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), these performative elements are actually indispensable to any conversion, whether an individual’s first or fifteenth.

Serial
converts served as uncomfortable reminders to their contemporaries that
religious identity is always unverifiable. The first study to explore
serial conversion as a discrete phenomenon in this era, The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England challenges
confessional divisions within much early modern historiography by
analyzing the surprising convergence of Protestant and Catholic in the
figure of the serial convert. It also reveals a neglected strain of
religious discourse in early modern England that valued mutability and
flexibility even in the midst of hardening and increasingly narrow
understandings of conversion.

Michael Shaw is a PhD student in Historical Theology at Union
College, Belfast, and a Visiting Tutor at the Irish Baptist College. His
research focuses on the thought of the Independent Puritan theologian
Jeremiah Burroughs (1599–1646). His primary research interests lie in
historical theology, particularly early modern Baptist and
Congregationalist theology and ecclesiology. He also serves as the
Associate Pastor at Strandtown Baptist Church, Belfast.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Edward Blum interviews Dr. Jamie L. Brummitt on how new book Protestant Relics in Early America.

In Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford UP, 2025), Jamie L. Brummitt upends long-held assumptions about religion and material culture in the early United States. Brummitt chronicles how American Protestants cultivated a lively relic culture centered around collecting supernatural memory objects associated with dead Christian leaders, family members, and friends. These objects materialized the real physical presences of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and souls of the dead on earth.As Brummitt demonstrates, people of nearly all Protestant denominations and walks of life--including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people--sought embodied and supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites like George Washington's Mount Vernon, purchased relics in the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, post-mortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the dead became Protestant relics. These relic practices were so pervasive that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from young women's education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife.In recovering the forgotten history and presence of Protestant relics in early America, Brummitt demonstrates how material practices of religion defined early American politics and how the Enlightenment enhanced rather than diminished embodied presence. Moreover, Brummitt reveals how the secular historical method has obscured the supernatural significance of relics for the Protestants who made, collected, exchanged, treasured, and passed them down. This book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early American history, religion, politics, art, and popular culture.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

How did the state become Christian in late antiquity? Many scholars
have traced the Christianization of the Roman world in the centuries
following the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312 CE. Robin
Whelan, however, turns his attention away from the usual suspects in
such accounts-emperors, empresses, bishops, ascetics, and other holy
people-to consider a surprisingly understudied set of late ancient
Christians: those who served the state as courtiers, bureaucrats, and
governors. By tracing the requirements of regimes, the expectations of
subjects, and patterns of engagement with churches and churchmen, he
argues that that those who served the state in late antiquity could be
seen-and indeed, could see themselves-as distinctly Christian authority
figures-just as much as the emperors and kings whom they served, and the
bishops and ascetics whom they governed. Serving the Christian State in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Robin Whelan is Reader in Mediterranean History at the University of Liverpool.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

Ancient apologetics is usually treated as a literary genre or a branch of early theology. This Element offers a different account. It argues that many Jewish and Christian texts conventionally labeled 'apologetic' are better understood through a bibliographic and archival lens: They produce authority not only by defending doctrines, but by organizing books, constructing corpora, mobilizing archives, and regulating interpretation. Tracing a trajectory from the Letter of Aristeas to Jerome's De viris illustribus, this Element shows how citation, collection, cataloguing, and textual ordering made traditions appear authoritative. Examining Aristeas, Josephus, Tatian, Justin, Origen, Pamphilus, Eusebius, and Jerome, it argues that apologetics is best understood as a form of curatorial power through which ancient communities learned to think with books. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Sabrina Inowlocki is a Senior Research Fellow Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry (IRCI) at the Australian Catholic University.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies