“Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape,” Tom Holland writes cleverly in the introduction to his enormous new book Dominion, “So now are many in the West reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of religious belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins.” Holland’s book is an attempt to argue that modern European civilization has its roots in Christianity, and that European culture is still “saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.”
Holland is a novelist and historian, whose elegant prose, good humor, and keen sense for an arresting image has been matched by a instinct for scholarly adventure. In his In the Shadow of the Sword, for example, Holland argued, in the face of some amount of Islamist intimidation, that the evidence for the historical truth of the origin stories of Islam is lacking. In Dominion he takes on the cheerful prejudices of secular liberalism.
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