New Books in Religion

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.
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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.
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A fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at non-religious funerals in contemporary London, An Honest Death: Life's End and Humanist Funerals (Princeton UP, 2026) is an intimate and moving ethnographic account of funerals for people who don’t believe in God or an afterlife. Focusing on secular funeral celebrants of the British Humanist Association (now called Humanists UK), the book examines how their ritual work is geared toward helping realize a secular world. There is a strong ethical commitment behind this effort, which is to face death with honesty based on the belief that this life is all we have. For the humanist celebrants and those they serve, this is what allows for a life with meaning and purpose. Written in a vivid style, the book centers on the lives and the funerals of particular people, from a three-year-old child to a man in his nineties. Anthropologist Matthew Engelke, who trained as a humanist celebrant as part of his research, describes how these officiants try to craft “sincere” funerals, avoiding language and music that might suggest that the person who died had any religious beliefs. The book also captures the highs and lows for humanist celebrants of working in the funeral business—a business that is, for many of them, a kind of vocational calling. Above all, An Honest Death draws out the tensions in secular humanist thought and practice between reason and the body, rationalism and materialism. Nothing matters more to the humanists than “daring to know” in the Enlightenment tradition, but nothing is so certainly known as the fact that we are finite and embodied creatures.

Matthew Engelke is professor and chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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Matthew Thomas Miller's new book Feeling like Lovers: Affect in Medieval Sufism (U California Press, 2026), and is available as an open access book (see link below), considers how for many medieval Sufis, Sufism was the “path of love”, and God was the Beloved, and so one had to become a lover of the Beloved on this path. And though there remains a rich corpus of Sufi texts from theological, legal to philosophical that speak to and about this trajectory, Miller re-focuses our attention to the felt and affective dimensions of the genre of poetry, especially of qalandariyyat or rogue poetry. In concentrating on these specific poems and their metaphoric and metaphysical treatments of beauty, sama‘ and ultimately fana’, we begin to the grasp the critical significance of how feelings and the felt dimension (experience) informs the path of love, particularly in how Sufis came to know the secret realities of the Beloved. In this way, the spectrum of emotion, aeffect (affect and effect) held in the body then help us restore the relationship between the mind-body in Sufi thought, according to Miller. This book will be of interest to those who enjoy Sufi and Persian poetry, as well as those who study history of emotion, affect, and literature as well as Sufism generally.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit here to learn more.
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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.
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