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The Dishcast · Andrew Sullivan

Tom Holland On Our Christian World

April 3, 2026·40 min·3 clips
Why the cross only worked as a religious symbol because it was the most humiliating death imaginable.
The weather is absurdly warm. The host opens in Holy Week, with DC at 80 degrees, pollen rising, tulips showing up, and war hovering nearby. That surface calm does some work. The episode soon turns to a memory of being near the Islamic State at Sinjar, frightened by immediate danger and by something much older. Crucifixion becomes the hinge. The guest describes women taken into slavery and men crucified, in a place where Roman punishment stopped feeling remote or safely trapped in books. The host catches the shock and pulls the thread back to Caesar in Gaul. What does it mean to face violent acts, and also the calm assumptions that made them thinkable? That is the abyss the conversation keeps circling. The terror is moral as well as physical, because it shows a world where crucifixion could be treated as allowed. Cato enters next. Even Caesar's Roman enemies seem less troubled by cruelty itself than by broken treaties and the risk of divine punishment. The gods do not punish Caesar. They seem to reward him with victory, which makes the episode's unease harder to tidy away. The conversation is grave without turning stiff. It is about ancient Rome and the brutality of the Islamic State, but also about how shaky moral certainty can feel when history stops behaving like background scenery. The host keeps it personal. Housekeeping, subscriptions, and the promise of no ads give way to a serious exchange about violence, conscience, and moral terror. Sinjar gives the story its force. Rome gives it the deeper chill. The closing returns to subscriptions, but the earlier image stays put: an ancient punishment appearing again in a modern war zone.

As heard by us

A bracing Dishcast conversation on Christianity, crucifixion, Rome, and the moral shock of treating cruelty as ordinary.

Tom Holland's visit to The Dishcast turns a Holy Week conversation toward crucifixion, empire, and the moral shock of worlds where cruelty is ordinary.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a war-and-history conversation that turns unexpectedly visceral.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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