If everyone shares an inherent worth, there should be no discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality. Most interesting to the modern reader is how, towards the end of the book, Holland ties together historic precedents peppered through the book and how seemingly novel and original ideas, such as Communism, are familiar to the reader by the end of the book. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (published as Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World in the United States) is a 2019 non-fiction history book by British historian Tom Holland.

The account is peppered with particularity — anecdotes, human portraits and the traces left on the landscape by vanished civilisations, all conveyed in lyrical, vivid language.In 2007, he was the winner of the Classical Association prize, awarded to ‘the individual who has done most to promote the study of the language, literature and civilisation of Ancient Greece and Rome’.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The geographic scope ranges from the Canaan of Abraham to Skellig Michael, where ascetic Irish monks did penance in the freezing Atlantic. Spartan warriors such as Leonidas whose people practiced eugenics and trained their children to kill undermenchen. To many feminists and advocates of gay rights, Christianity seemed the opponent representing bigotry, injustice and persecution.

A hierarchy of victimhood that could be summed up as” the last shall be first and the last first” In 2017 Harvey Weinstein a movie mogul had allegations brought against him for harassment , rape and assault by eighty women. average hourly wage with the cost of a suite at the Peninsula costing over two thousand dollars a night.

Yet what distinguishes the Judeo-Christian idea of love from the romantic, erotic, touchy-feely sense it has acquired in modern times is that it has nothing to do with feeling. Holland although he does not use the term, describes the social justice theory of “intersectionality” where all the various stratifications in society served to marginalise some more than others. There is even a medieval forerunner of feminism in the figure of the Milanese noblewoman Guglielma, who announced that she was the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women, and with engaging modesty baptised them in the name of the Father, the Son and herself.The powerless came to be seen a God’s children and therefore deserving of respect as much as the highest in society.

Tom Holland’s gist is that an awful lot of the things we hold to be self-evident in terms of human rights and values — the equality of man (and woman), our solidarity with the weak against the strong, the displacement of religious law by the law of love —squarely derive from the life and teachings of Christ and their subsequent application to our way of looking at the world by his followers, starting with that cultivated and brilliant Jew, St Paul. The author on occasion does some myth-busting and makes a retelling of well known historical events (such as the Galileo debacle) with more context. In this way, both Catholics and atheists might together critique Holland and perhaps mischievously suggest that he is being influenced by his own Protestant background? Yet the author even manages to demonstrate that more paradoxical concepts such as humanism, secularism and agnosticism have roots in Christianity. Holland further argues that concepts now usually considered non-religious or universal, such as secularism, liberalism, science, socialism and Marxism, revolution, feminism, and even homosexuality, "are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed", [6] [7] [8] and that the influence of Christianity on Western civilization has been so complete "that it has come to be hidden from view".If great books encourage you to look at the world in an entirely new way, then Dominion is a very great book indeed . They were branded as rootless vagrants who delighted in being alien, and thus made a boast out of what should have been a source of shame. This extraordinary book is vintage Tom Holland: history boldly and elegantly retold, with fascinating interconnections traced to create a narrative that cannot fail to stimulate, for it leads to a never-ending question -- Diarmaid MacCulloch Holland is an illuminating guide on a journey from Ancient Athens to 21st-century gay rights * History Revealed * Sustained with all the breadth, originality and erudition that we have come to associate with Holland's writing * Spectator * Fizzing with insights and challenges, this is one history book that is timely and important, as well as a feast of intellectual entertainment -- Christopher Hart * Sunday Times * Holland is an exceptionally good storyteller with a marvellous eye for detail * The Economist * An all-absorbing story * Literary Review * This book has ruffled feathers . But those dismissive of religion, for which I have some sympathy, should understand that many of their valued concepts of equality, emancipation and liberalism originate in Christianity. Terrific: bold, ambitious and passionate -- Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads Tom Holland is fun to read, monstrously erudite, wickedly joyful, and ahead of the established consensus, on average, by four years, three months, and two days -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the Incerto (The Black Swan, Antifragile.