Studies of martyrdom have proliferated in the last fifteen years, due in part to the historiographical ‘turn to religion’ as well as interest in the emergence of religious fundamentalisms around the world. This latest collection of essays, however, provides an especially thoughtful overview of the social, theological and political aspects of Christian martyrdom across history, offering important insights from a number of recent theoretical (though also largely Catholic) perspectives. Particularly strong are essays on martyrdom in the first centuries of Christianity, including Lawrence Cunningham's discussion of its theological development, and Tripp York's exploration of early martyrdom ‘as the archetypal act of Christian witness’ and ‘a public bodily confession’ of the faith (pp. 17, 23). Meanwhile, in a discussion of Paul's letters, Stephen Fowl argues that martyrdom ‘is but one species of a larger narrative genre that comprehends the death of believers … within a wider range of other faithful practices’ attesting to ‘God's drama of salvation’ (p. 44). The implications of this public bodily witness for women is discussed by Joyce Salisbury, with Ann Astell exploring the centrality of the eucharist in the judgement and execution of Joan of Arc. The early modern period is covered by Brad Gregory, who examines the justifications for persecution (or prosecution); the essay is valuable, if unnecessarily polemical in its creation of straw men, as no serious scholar writing today – and he names none – simply ‘denounces’ the judicial treatment of religious heterodoxy in the past (p. 111). Most understand that persecution arose in great part out of the realities of the early modern state – a point made by William Sessions, who argues that state-building rather than religion per se was responsible for much of the religious violence in its quest for uniformity. Martyrdom in an ostensibly secular and tolerant age is finally addressed in essays by Emmanuel Katongole and Eric Hanson, who remind readers of the Christian struggle in the developing world, including China and India. But perhaps most interesting is D. Stephen Long and Geoffrey Holdclaw's essay that asks, ‘What is worth dying for?’ in a liberal-secular-consumerist order that seeks nothing beyond what Giorgio Agamben has labelled, in a Hobbesian turn, as ‘bare life’. In an age when ‘the only thing worth dying for is the preservation of the conditions for a politics where nothing is worth dying for’ (p. 175), the authors thus seek a ‘retrieval of orthodoxy’ and truth claims as a way beyond the existing order and the often unquestioned power it exerts. Citing Archbishop Rowan Williams, they believe that this also means that alternative laws, such as the Sharia code, should be accommodated in a ‘post-secular’ politics (p. 181). This advocacy of legal plurality is valid; yet one cannot help but wonder what they would think of some current US presidential candidates, who also believe in moving beyond the secular and constitutional order, to impose what they and other Evangelicals call ‘Christian biblical law’: something, in their own view, to die – and perhaps kill – for.