Mark Tooley is IRD’s president and editor of IRD’s foreign policy and national security journal, Providence. Prior to joining the IRD in 1994, Mark worked eight years for the Central Intelligence Agency. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and is a native of Arlington, Virginia. He is the author of Taking Back The United Methodist Church, published in 2008; Methodism and Politics in the 20th Century, published in 2012; and The Peace That Almost Was: The Forgotten Story of the 1861 Washington Peace Conference and the Final Attempt to Avert the Civil War, published in 2015.
Follow Mark on Twitter: @markdtooley
Arguably the Iran War is America’s first post-Christian war, heralded with brutalist rhetoric, not a moral vision. The problem is not so much “bad theology,” but no theology.
Mark TooleyApril 8, 2026
With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed. – Abraham Lincoln
Mark TooleyMarch 24, 2026
A Christian Realist view, different from nearly all forms of Christian Nationalism, is that social righteousness advances haphazardly and providentially.
Mark TooleyMarch 12, 2026
Even in the enforcement of just laws, state authorities can be captive to their own hubris.
Mark TooleyFebruary 23, 2026
A new documentary confronts Leni Riefenstahl’s lifelong denial of complicity in Nazi crimes, revealing how artistic brilliance and moral blindness can coexist—and why forgetting history invites its return.
Mark TooleyNovember 19, 2025
America could have prevented World War II and, with benevolent wisdom and fraternal strength, can forestall another.
Mark TooleySeptember 2, 2025
Monsters must be dealt with. But there should never be confusion about what they are.
Mark TooleyAugust 27, 2025
In Cold War literature, Forsyth was a sort of Homer of popular but sophisticated thrillers that demonstrated what made and sustained the West.
Mark TooleyJuly 28, 2025
May we all strive to be a “sincere Lover of Liberty.”
Mark TooleyJuly 11, 2025
“The Founders way of thinking about liberty is much more alert to dangers to liberty in civil society.”
Mark TooleyJuly 3, 2025