Jonathan Sheehan

A synthesis of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural developments that offers an original explanation of how Enlightenment thought grappled with the problem of divine agency. Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems—natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others—whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the...

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,...