Mark Tooley

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

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Battle Hymn of Responsibility
Battle Hymn of Responsibility

Christian clergymen of today typically prefer to disparage power and prestige as demonic ensnarements that Jesus shunned when offered. But Jesus exemplifies not the rejection of power per se but rather a godly deployment of it.

Marion Le Pen, Catholics, Protestants, Conservatives, CPAC
Marion Le Pen, Catholics, Protestants & Conservatives

French National Party politico Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, 28 year old granddaughter of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, spoke at the annual conservative jamboree CPAC. Marion Le Pen is beautiful and compelling, but wariness is in order.

Peter Hitchens’ Despair for Britain

Perpetually grouchy British conservative commentator Peter Hitchens, Christian brother to the late atheist (and more optimistic) journalist Christopher Hitchens, in…

Espionage, Conspiracies & Divine Sovereignty

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton is the latest book on the legendary longtime counterintelligence chief who divided his own agency and much of Western intelligence with his conspiracy theories.

Evangelicals Global Christian Zionism Israel
Evangelicals and Global Christian Zionism

Important to Israel’s improved global standing is the ongoing global growth of pro-Israel Evangelicals, numbering in the hundreds of millions, whose influence could affect foreign policy in dozens of nations in the Global South.

“The Post” & American “Lies”

The Post with Meryl Streep as publisher Katherine Graham and Tom Hanks as editor Ben Bradlee recalls the 1971 battle…

Americans as Killers

National Review‘s critique of the new Western film Hostiles, with Christian Bale in the lead role as a cavalry officer,…

Recalling a Radical Think-Tank

Over Christmas, I noticed an obituary for Marcus Raskin, who co-founded the once high profile Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a leftist, not-so-much-noticed-anymore Washington, DC, think-tank that during the Cold War some conservative critics insinuated was in cahoots with Soviet intelligence.

Good Books of 2017

Here are some books I enjoyed over the past year: American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop By Caroline…

Churchill, Halifax, & Christmas Eve

The new film Darkest Hour about Churchill’s tense first days as premier movingly portrays how the fortitude of the common…

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