In this episode of Marksism, Mark Tooley and Marc LiVecche discuss Tom Holland’s Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. They evaluate Holland’s claim that Christianity has been triumphant across Western civilization, and they ask the question: What happens as people within Christian-based societies dechristianize? What happens when Christian sensibilities, like a yearning for justice, are ungrounded in Hebraic principles? Tooley and LiVecche then look to the future, asking if there are any current political competitors that directly challenge greater Christian premises. China? Islamism? Communism? Neo-Facism? Finally, the editors discuss LiVecche’s experience as a scholar at Oxford University and his future work at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
Marksism | Ep. 7: On Western Civilization
By Mark Tooley & Marc LiVecche on July 4, 2020
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
Marc LiVecche is the McDonald Distinguished Scholar of Ethics, War, and Public Life at Providence. He is also a non-resident research fellow at the US Naval War College, in the College of Leadership and Ethics.
Marc completed doctoral studies, earning distinction, at the University of Chicago, where he worked under the supervision of the political theorist and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain, until her death in August, 2013. His first book, The Good Kill: Just War & Moral Injury, was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press. Another project, Responsibility and Restraint: James Turner Johnson and the Just War Tradition, co-edited with Eric Patterson, was published by Stone Tower Press in the fall of 2020. Currently, he is finalizing Moral Horror: A Just War Defense of Hiroshima. Before all this academic stuff, Marc spent twelve years doing a variety of things in Central Europe—ranging from helping build sport and recreational leagues in post-communist communities, to working at a Christian study and research center, to leading seminars on history and ethics onsite at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp in Poland. This latter experience allowed him to continue his undergraduate study of the Shoah; a process which rendered him entirely ill-suited for pacifism.
Marc lives in Annapolis, Maryland with his wife and children–and a marmota monax whistlepigging under the shed. He can be followed, or stalked, on twitter @mlivecche. Additional publications can be found at his Amazon author page.
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