Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

If Roman power upheld the peace that enabled him to travel the world, then he would not jeopardise his mission by urging his converts to rebel against it. Too much was at stake. There was no time to weave the entire fabric of society anew. What mattered, in the brief window of opportunity that Paul had been granted, was to establish as many churche

‘So the last will be first, and the first last.’

That truth might deceive was a paradox with which the Greeks were well acquainted.

No ancient artist would have thought to honour a Caesar by representing him as Caravaggio represented Peter: tortured, humiliated, stripped almost bare.

‘The god does not rule by issuing commands.’25 Such guidelines as mortal men had set for them derived from tradition, not revelation. Law was so dependent on custom as to be indistinguishable from it. With the coming of democracy, though, that assumption was challenged. The right of the people to determine legislation emerged as something fundament

Whether in North Korea or in the command structures of jihadi terrorist cells, there are few so ideologically opposed to the West that they are not sometimes obliged to employ the international dating system. Whenever they do so, they are subliminally reminded of the claims made by Christianity about the birth of Jesus. Time itself has been Christi

Assumptions that I had grown up with – about how a society should properly be organised, and the principles that it should uphold – were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past.

never for a moment forgot his own limitations. He was not such a hypocrite as to set himself up as a second Moses. If asked for counsel, he would give it; but this was not to be mistaken for commandments from God. His correspondence was no second Torah. Rather than lay down the law of Christ, his role as an apostle was altogether more modest: to he

To commit to Christ was to be plunged into water: to be baptised. Old identities were washed away.