Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

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According to the author, the book "isn’t a history of Christianity" but "a history of what's been revolutionary and transformative about Christianity: about how Christianity has transformed not just the West, but the entire world. Despite these omissions, Dominion packs an astonishing amount of stuff into its 500 pages on Christianity’s enduring influence. These men are nationalist bigots, which suggests another sense in which Christianity can be subversive. However, if you are well versed in the history of Christian history and scripture, you may find that you are familiar with a significant amount of the content although I doubt that there will be many readers who will have encountered every story or vignette presented. We stand at the end-point of an extraordinary transformation in the understanding of what it is to be human: one that can only be fully appreciated by tracing the arc of its parabola over millennia.

He had resolved to forgive Quoting Matthew: “you have heard that it was said love your neighbour and hate your enemy, but I tell you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven” FW de Klerk resolved to set Mandela free. Ranging in time from the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC to the on-going migration crisis in Europe today, and from Nebuchadnezzar to the Beatles, it will explore just what it was that made Christianity so revolutionary and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mind-set of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that has become increasingly doubtful of religion's claims, so many of its instincts remain irredeemably Christian. But if you are open minded and not already an expert, it should be an enjoyable and worthwhile read.However, I think Holland could have looked to more contemporary non-Christian cultures to highlight differences. Apart from providing a brilliant history of Christianity in the first part, the book essentially demonstrates that common liberal and secular values of human rights owe a lot to Christianity and that these are extensions of the religion.

It is an epic masterpiece of storytelling and scholarship which gives an objective picture of the Christian contribution to the development of how we view the world. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. Paul willingly put this manifesto into practice by abandoning his privileges, including the rights of Roman citizenship. Yet the author even manages to demonstrate that more paradoxical concepts such as humanism, secularism and agnosticism have roots in Christianity. For Holland, Calvin’s Geneva “the shelter that the city could offer refugees was like streams of water to a panting deer” Calvin recognised that there was resentment towards refugees, but he never questioned his responsibility to educate his community.

Holland highlights the pivotal role of Martin Luther King, a southern pastor a magnificent orator and organiser who sought the peaceful route to challenge discriminatory actions and legislation. Holland was repulsed by the idea that the poor or weak might not have any intrinsic value in the ancient world. If great books encourage you to look at the world in an entirely new way, then Dominion is a very great book indeed .

Holland traces back to christian lore concepts and ideas nowadays erroneously thought of as universal, as naturally emergent, while in fact they are culturally contingent and stem from Christianity - human rights, abolition of slavery, secularism, gender identity, equality of sexes, etc. Thomas Cajetan appointed head of the Dominicans was shocked to think that a Christian ruler should think to justify conquest and savagery in the name of a crucified Christ.According to Holland, over the course of writing about the " apex predators" of the ancient world, particularly the Romans, "I came to feel they were increasingly alien, increasingly frightening to me". Indeed, it could have been expanded to explain how Holland feels about the way he thinks as a non-Christian and how he reconciles that with the work of Nietzsche that he himself has commented on. The obvious riposte to all this is that the church has often been oppressive and persecuting, and Holland makes that point vividly. It was released to positive reviews, although some historians and philosophers objected to some of Holland's conclusions.