ABSTRACT
IfChristian texts emphasizing amaterial resurrection promote social inclusiveness, do they also provide a disturbing precedent? The account of the Passion of Perpetua, in which a young woman, a new mother, a beloved daughter, gives no heed to her father’s pleas or her child’s needs but instead asserts that her commitment to Christianity requires her to die, gives one pause. Does valorization of this text and similar examples of a willing witness unto death lead toward the slippery slope that ends with the aggressive acts of witnessing that trouble contemporary times?1 This chapter suggests the contrary: thePassion of Perpetua, alongwith theChristian discourse providing its context, offers an opening that, if it had been pursued, would have gone far to assuage the violence that manymaintain is the “real,” the recurring traumatic kernel, at the center of every historical society.2
