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Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

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However, I think Holland could have looked to more contemporary non-Christian cultures to highlight differences. In Holland's view, pre-Christian societies and deities, such as in the Greco-Roman world, tended to focus on and glorify strength, might and power; this was inverted with the spread of Christianity, which proclaimed the primacy of the weak and suffering. Christianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history.

Holland after twenty years of reading about classical antiquity recognised what a rupture Christianity created from the pagan culture.

Holland also argues that many of those who clearest recognized the "radical" implications of Christianity, and its departure from earlier morality, were those fundamentally opposed to it – including Friedrich Nietzsche, the Marquis de Sade and the Nazi Party. 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 . Holland was repulsed by the idea that the poor or weak might not have any intrinsic value in the ancient world.

It speaks of how you will know who God is when you see the poor coming to power and the rich sent empty away. He also has an intense, sometimes rather grisly feel for the physical: the book is resonant with the cracking of bones, flaying of flesh and shrieks of small children tossed into fires. Written with terrific learning, enthusiasm and good humour, Holland's book is not just supremely provocative, but often very funny * Sunday Times * A bravura swing through centuries of Western European history .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.

Holland claims that the multiple injustices suffered by marginalised individuals in recent years has created an awakening which has its origins in Christianity.Clearly Holland is precisely the type of thinker that he describes Nietzsche holding in such contempt - i. Krafft-Ebing rather than condemning sodomy saw Christianity’s great contribution to civilisation: lifelong monogamy. When Caravaggio depicted the first pope, St Peter, he didn’t represent pomp but the indignity of his upside-down crucifixion. In balance to these negatives, there were many instances of truly magnificent people who shed life's pleasures and comfort and devoted themselves to spreading the word of God.

Recommended to anyone looking to get a new perspective on how western culture was and continues to be this day shaped by a death of a single man in a rem This book takes you on a high speed jaunt through the last two thousand years of Western history with plenty of interesting stories to support Tom Holland's argument that Christianity has been fundamental in shaping the way we think today whether we are actually Christians or not.Yet critics of Holland's argument could also point non-Christian cultures and identify many more similarities in culture and thought that they enjoy with the West. The Los Angeles Review of Books stated that " Dominion's most important contribution is in emphasizing how terms we take for granted, even concepts seemingly as fundamental as 'religion' and 'secular,' come 'freighted with the legacy of Christendom'", stating that his argument about the Christian origin of "human rights, socialism, revolution, feminism, science, and even the division between religion and the secular" is carried out in a "mostly convincing way". The powerless came to be seen a God’s children and therefore deserving of respect as much as the highest in society. In a mixed review, Gerard DeGroot, writing for The Sunday Times, wrote that "while I don't remotely accept Holland's thesis, I have to commend the originality of this book, not to mention his brave ambition. A further point of interest was how the Jewish community in Prussia modified their identification with a Jewish nation to that of Jewishness as a religion a fact which was enforced upon them by Prussan regulations.

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