New books on martyrdom

Two very good and readable books which explore martyrdom have come to my attention recently. One is Chris Huebner's A Precarious Peace; the other is Craig Hovey's To Share in the Body.

Both writers are clearly of the Hauerwas-Yoder school, though I don't mean that to be a pigeon-holing of them. I particularly enjoyed this, about promise, from Hovey:

...the truth of a martyr's testimony is like the meaning of the martyr's death: both are gifts. Promise is the way that a gift is known. It is known without being grasped, leaving the promise maker free to fulfill the promise. It is impossible to have a promise without the promise maker. Grasping after promises turns promises into brute knowledge bereft of surprises and alienates the free action of the promise maker. Ultimately grasping actually results in the death of the promise maker, just as the heri in the parable of the vineyard is not just beaten and sent away but killed. A bruised heir will still inherit the vineyard according to the promise of inheritance; the heir's death is the only way to secure tenancy as a possession.

In the same way, a dead Jesus allows for a knowledge of grasping, controlling, and manipulating. Promises are unwound, detatched from both thei beginning and end. They float free as words and phrases that are made to function according to the logic of convenience, persuasion, defense, and ideology. When they are spoken, it becomes impossible for such words to constitute true testimony because their truth was only ever bound up with the continuing faithfulnes of the one who gave them to us. Ironically, the grasping and controlling that released knowledge from promise in hopes of imparting direct access to them has actually worked counter-productively. Such knowledge may be useful for accomplishing ends, but it can no longer be true knowledge, as direct apprehension is revelaed to be a myth in which what is apprehended is evacuated of anything new of real. A dead Jesus means dead knowledge.
In contrast, though, the Holy Spirit is the spirit of the risen Christ, whose presence owes to Jeuss's promise to remain with his disciples and not leave them on their own. The gift that is the Holy Spirit continues to give the gifts of promise... p. 145-6