Abstract
Many opponents of religion claim that violence and oppression are the characteristics of this distinctive human activity, not the love and peace that we so often assume. Novelist and poet Mary Jane Engh makes a fair case that they are correct, based on a survey of twenty-two cases of religious persecution across the millennia and around the world. It is impossible to browse her vignettes and come away unimpressed by the inventiveness, persistence, and relative pettiness of persecution in all its myriad forms. However, the subject is still waiting for a more definitive treatment than this ultimately disappointing cook's tour through too much diversity squeezed into too few boxes, valuable primarily for its pointers to quality treatments in each chapter's suggested readings.