Abstract
The author of the monograph, Yvonne Sherwood, has been working at prestigious British universities for three decades and has written several very successful books, with the most recent one, published in the popular Oxford edition of A Very Short Introduction, dealing with - as the title reveals - blasphemy. In an increasingly secularised world, the author believes that blasphemy should essentially be obsolete and might seem to have lost its provocative sparkle.
Despite this, she claims that blasphemy is on the rise and not a month goes by without the global media reporting on some sort of blasphemy with a significant impact on society. One of the most notorious examples was the 2015 massacre of the editors of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo when blasphemy against the prophet Muhammad provoked an unexpectedly extreme reaction that turned into the murder of editors and random passers-by.