Author: Adam Kotsko File Type: pdf The most enduring challenge to traditional monotheism is the problem of evil, which attempts to reconcile three incompatible propositions God is all-good, God is all-powerful, and evil happens. The Prince of This World traces the story of one of the most influential attempts to square this circle the offloading of responsibility for evil onto one of Gods rebellious creatures. In this striking reexamination, the devils story is bitterly ironic, full of tragic reversals. He emerges as a theological symbol who helped oppressed communities cope with the trauma of unjust persecution, torture, and death at the hands of political authorities and eventually becomes a vehicle to justify oppression at the hands of Christian rulers. And he evolves alongside the biblical God, who at first presents himself as the liberator of the oppressed but ends up a cruel ruler who delights in the infliction of suffering on his friends and enemies alike. In other words, this is the story of how God becomes the devila devil who remains with us in our ostensibly secular age. **Review A substantial contribution to recent studies of the figure of the devil in Christian theology. Adam Kotsko goes beyond the biography of an icon to a provocative investigation of the devils many lives and effects in cultural and political ideologies. Not only that, his book is a great read.Laurel C. Schneider, Vanderbilt University This diabolically gripping genealogy offers a stunning parable of western politics religious and secular. It tracks as has never been done before the dramatic shifts of the relation between God and the Devilconflict, rivalry, game of mirrors, fusion. With the ironic wisdom of a postmodern Beatrice, Kotsko guides us through the sequence of hells that leads to our own.Catherine Keller, Drew University About the Author Adam Kotsko is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College in Chicago. His books include Why We Love Sociopaths (2012) and Politics of Redemption (2010).

Author: Miles Glendinning File Type: pdf From Los Angeles to London to Bilbao, cities around the world nowadays boast iconic buildings by celebrity starchitects that compete for attention on the skyline and in the media. But in recent years, criticism of these gestural structures, famous for their exaggerated forms, has been growing. Miles Glendinnings impassioned polemic, Architectures Evil Empire? looks at how such cult works have fatally subverted the built environment as a whole. How a world-wide empire of contemporary modernism emerged within the context of global capitalisms excesses is explained in this book. Arguing against the excesses of iconic design, Glendinning advocates a modern renewal that seeks to remedy the tragically alienated state of contemporary architecture, although his is a renewal that contrasts strongly with the traditionalist visions of Americas New Urbanists or Britains Prince Charles. Mingling scholarship with wry humour and a genuine concern for the present situation, Architectures Evil Empire? will raise heated debates across the continents, for this book is essential reading for architects, planners and everyone else concerned about the built environment of now and tomorrow. **Review One of the effects of our brand-led and time-starved world is that whatever cultural endeavour you choose to undertake staging an art exhibition hosting a club night or commissioning a building of a new skyscraper, people only seem to notice if there is a big named involved. Consequently, architecture has seen a rise in celebrity Starchitects. This handful of names is often given carte blanche to dump masses of concrete and steel in conceptual yet dysfunctional heaps around the world with scant regard for the cultural mores of the folk who live there. The trend for such gestural constructs is finally and rightly challenged here in this wry and passionate polemic addressing the state of contemporary architecture. An unsettling book for some, but of interest to all. (Bookseller) Engrossing . . . Glendinnings polemic argues that the spectacularisation of architecture creates alienated places and people. Late 20th-century modernist architectures failure to give form to a humane socio-industrial revolution collapsed in the 1980s and 1990s into a veneration of inherently capitalist design geniuses. Their arbitrarily flamboyant buildings have little social or historical integrity. Glendinning marshals his arguments deftly and his quoted material burns bright . . . admirable.*Independent * (Independent) In Architectures Evil Empire?, Glendinning is . . . concerned with what has been done in the name of regeneration. But, rather than looking at generic housing and malls, he concerns himself with the recent phenomenon of civic boosterism, by which towns and cities draw attention to themselves through look-at-me cultural buildings. The emergence of the starchitect has turned traditionally socially conscious modernism down the blind alley of personal expression. Glendinning traces the problems from that proto-icon the Sydney Opera House, through Frank Gehrys Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and onward. (Edwin Heathcote Financial Times) Miles Glendinnings book hits the spot . . . like all effective polemics this one turns swift and stylish, and comes to a positive conclusion rebuild your cities slowly and carefully integrate into them what was good about what was there before remember that buildings are supposed to dignify people shut up and stop showing off. (Architecture Today) Glendinning marshals his arguments deftly and his quoted material burns bright . . . Its not architectural icons that Glendinning fears most, but the hidden iceberg of decadent causes and effects on which they perch. (Jay Merrick Sunday Tribune (Ireland)) About the Author Miles Glendinninga reader in the School of Architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art and director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies. He is the author and co-author of many books, including Tower Block Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Clone City Crisis and Renewal in Contemporary Scottish Architecture, The Last Icons and Modern Architect The Life and Times of Robert Matthew.