Friday 12 June 2026 at 13h CEST
Prof. em. Dr. Moshe Halbertal (NYU Law School / The Hebrew University) & Prof. Dr. Jonathan Sheehan (UC Berkeley)
Lunch lecture in English. Free entrance. Registration required.
Lecture in the Hof van Liere, Prentenkabinet, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerp.
The lecture is also available via Zoom.
To register, click here.
This lunch lecture brings together two leading scholars of philosophy of religion and intellectual history— Prof. Moshe Halbertal and Prof. Jonathan Sheehan— for a double lecture devoted to the meanings of sacrifice across religious and secular traditions. The event will open a comparative conversation between two landmark Princeton University Press publications that appeared a decade apart and have each reshaped contemporary debates on sacrifice.
Moshe Halbertal’s On Sacrifice (2012) offers a probing philosophical and anthropological account of sacrifice as a practice that binds communities together while simultaneously exposing them to the dangers of violence, loss, and moral excess. Halbertal examines sacrifice as a structure of giving that can generate profound ethical commitments but also destructive forms of absolutism. His work has become a touchstone for scholars seeking to understand the ambivalent power of sacrificial acts in religious and political life.
Jonathan Sheehan’s On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular (2026) provides a sweeping historical study of how Christianity both abolished and absorbed sacrifice, tracing its “double life” from the early church through the Reformation and into modern secular imaginaries. Sheehan shows how debates over Christ’s death, martyrdom, and ritual offering shaped Christian theology as well as broader cultural and political formations, revealing sacrifice as a persistent conceptual force in the secular world.
Together, Halbertal and Sheehan will explore how sacrifice has been imagined, contested, and transformed across traditions, offering an interdisciplinary dialogue on one of the most enduring and paradoxical concepts in human culture.
Moshe Halbertal is the Gruss Professor at NYU Law School, the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Hebrew University, and a member of Israel’s National Academy for Sciences and the Humanities. Among his books are Idolatry (co-authored with Avishai Margalit) and People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority, both published by Harvard University Press. His books On Sacrifice, Maimonides: Life and Thought, and The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel were published by Princeton University Press. His latest book, Nahmanides: Law and Mysticism was published by Yale University Press in September 2020.
Jonathan Sheehan is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of European History at UC Berkeley and former Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion. He is a European intellectual and cultural historian whose work focuses on the history of Christianity, the history of knowledge, and the history of secular modernity. His most influential book The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture shows how the Enlightenment transformed, rather than rejected, the Bible, turning it from a sacred text into a work of culture. His most recent book On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular (forthcoming in 2026) explores the long history of Christian sacrifice from the ancient world to the nineteenth century. His scholarship has been published in Past and Present, Journal of the History of Ideas, Modern Intellectual History, and other leading journals.