Bloodshed and Blessing

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.