Author: Brian Harding File Type: pdf The interplay between violence, religion, and politics is a central problem for societies and has attracted the attention of important philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Rene Girard. Centuries earlier during the Italian Renaissance, these same problems drew the interest of Niccolo Machiavelli. In Not Even a God Can Save Us Now, Brian Harding argues that Machiavellis work anticipates and often illuminates contemporary theories on the place of violence in our lives. While remaining cognizant of the historical and cultural context of Machiavellis writings, Harding develops Machiavellis accounts of sacrifice, truth, religion, and violence and places them in conversation with those of more contemporary thinkers. Including in-depth discussions of Machiavellis works The Prince and Discourses on Livy, as well as his Florentine Histories, The Art of War, and other less widely discussed works, Harding interprets Machiavelli as endorsing sacrificial violence that founds or preserves a state, while censuring other forms of violence. This reading clarifies a number of obscure themes in Machiavellis writings, and demonstrates how similar themes are at work in the thought of recent phenomenologists. The first book to approach both Machiavellian and contemporary continental thought in this way, Not Even a God Can Save Us Now is a highly original and provocative approach to both the history of philosophy and to contemporary debates about violence, religion, and politics. **

Author: Aidan Nichols File Type: pdf After a long period of comparative neglect, starting almost immediately upon his death in 1900, John Ruskin began to attract, from the 1960s onwards, a remarkable degree of critical interest. Although the formidably ample Library Edition of Ruskins works will always constitute the primary basis for interpretation, there is also newly available source material, in the form of letters and (in part) diaries, as well as a scintillating body of modern comment to which the present study seeks to contribute. Ruskin had an extraordinary ability to bring together aesthetics, religion, ecology, and social issues in a unitary, overarching vision, all expressed in a prose style worthy of comparison with any in the English language. All Great Art is Praise focuses especially on the themes of art and religion, for Aidan Nichols takes the view that Ruskins writings on art cannot be appreciated without taking into account at many points his approach to religion. This volume offers an analytic account of Ruskins principal writings on art, viewed through the lens of Ruskins religious claims. For readers new to Ruskin, an opening chapter provides an overview of his work in the context of a life that combined public celebrity with private sorrow. Succeeding chapters consider his comments on art and religion in broadly chronological order, ending with the highly innovative open letters to working men, and his moving autobiography which was left unfinished at the time of his descent into madness and death. Ruskins evaluations of (among others) Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, the Italian Primitives, and the artists of the high Renaissance, gave the Victorians eyes to see. But his writings call for comment not only from literary scholars and art historians but also from students of ideas since they address a wide range of issues in both theology and philosophy. The volume looks especially closely at Ruskins changing attitudes to Catholicism. The son of a stoutly Bible-Protestant mother and a father politically opposed to the civil emancipation of Catholics, Ruskin found it increasingly difficult to combine his inherited anti-Catholicism with his appreciation of Byzantine-Venetian, Renaissance-humanist, and Franciscan-evangelical art and the program for living these contained or implied. The rumors in late life of his immanent conversion to Rome proved unfounded, but they were not implausible. All Great Art is Praise seeks to show why. **

Author: Beryl Satter File Type: mobi Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicagoand cities across the nation The promised land for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nations worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.s first campaign beyond the South. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the citys black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. In Satters riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteersthe authors father, Mark J. Satter. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression the discriminatory practices of the banking industry the federal policies that created the countrys shameful dual housing market the economic anxieties that fueled white violence and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the citys most vulnerable population. A monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America. **From Publishers Weekly In the early 1950s, Mark Satter opened his law practice in the Chicago suburb of Lawndale, but his lifes work really began in 1957, the day a black couple, Albert and Sallie Bolton, walked through his doors needing a stay on an eviction from a home they had just purchased. Satter uncovered a citywide scheme, in which landlords sold African-Americans overpriced homes, keeping the titles until black homeowners paid them off, while charging excessive interest rates to insure they never could. Called contract selling, the practice cost thousands of migrating blacks their livelihoods. Mark Satter died of a heart condition eight years after the Boltons crossed his threshold, but nearly 50 years later, his daughter, Beryl, a history professor at Rutgers, picked up where he left off. Setting out to prove that the decline of black neighborhoods into slums had nothing to do with the absence of African-American resources and everything to do with subjugation and greed, Satter draws on her fathers records to piece together a thoughtful and very personal account of the exploitation that kept blacks segregated and impoverished. (Mar.) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. Review Beryl Satters Family Properties is really an incredible book. It is, by far, the best book Ive ever read on the relationship between blacks and Jews. Thats because it hones in on the relationship between one specific black community and one specific Jewish community and thus revels in the particular humanity of all its actors. In going small, it ultimately goes big. Ta-Nehisi Coates, *The Atlantic This is rich material Satter balances personal stories, including moments of great bravery, with painstaking legal and historical research. Family Properties is transfixing from the first sentence. The pleasures here are deep and resonate ones an instant classic. Dwight Garner, The New York Times* Satters painstaking thorough portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North. Family Properties is a superbly revealing and often gripping book. David Garrow, The Washington Post Beryl Satter has taken the hard road to glory in her study of race and housing discrimination in Chicago during the 1950s and 60s. Yet somehow she has managed to stay on course, using her considerable investigative skills and unwavering sense of fairness to write a revealing and instructive book A cautionary tale of government complicity, Family Properties follows the social historians dictum of asking big questions in small places. It reminds us that history and memory are essential tools for anyone pondering our current predicament. The New York Times Book Review This sweeping chronicle of greed and racism combines a noble and tragic family history with a painful account of big city segregation and courageous acts of community resistance. In riveting stories and thoughtful analysis, Satter powerfully discloses how manipulation and abuse shattered lives and deepened urban inequality. Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America Beryl Satter brings Chicagos West Side to life in this vivid history of a neighborhood fighting for survival. She gives the urban crisis a human face in unforgettable portraits of the slumlords and the activists and lawyers (including her father) who battled valiantly against them. Thomas J. Sugrue, author of Sweet Land of Liberty The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North This history of a place called Lawndale, on the west side of Chicago, is an archetypal American story of struggle and rise, race and divisiveness, justice denied and then justice achieved. Clyde Ross, Ruth Wells, Mark J. Satter, Monsignor Egan, Jack Macnamara, and the othersthese are American heroes. I was privileged to be briefly involved, and Im so glad to see Family Properties, after all these years, that I could hoot with joy, and then weep. David Quammen, author of Song of the Dodo Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction This is how the story of urban America after the Second World War ought to be written, with gritty realism and no illusions. Here is urban history as a drama of moral conflict and religious passion. Family Properties is a searing and deeply moving work, by a loving daughter and a great historian. Robert Orsi, Professor of Religion and History, Northwestern University One of the most contentious issues of twentieth century America was the transformation of middle-class white neighborhoods into African-American slums. The cast of characters is familiarunscrupulous realtors, heartless slumlords, promiscuous welfare mothers, rapacious drug dealers, corrupt politicians, discriminatory savings and loan associations, and a racist government. But Beryl Satter tells a different story, a nuanced story, and a personal storyin this compelling re-examination of a phenomenon everyone knows about and no one understands. Family Properties will change the way you think about history and about causation. Kenneth T. Jackson, Barzun Professor of History, Columbia University

Author: Plato File Type: pdf font face=DejaVu Sans, serifspan 14pxhttpwww.archive.orgdetailsrepublicshorey01platuoft,spanfont