Kingdom Vs. Empire

David Benjamin Blower's first book was devised as 100-odd pages of liner notes accompanying his latest musical output. But what he and musical comrades the Army of the Broken Hearted have been communicating for years, on stages and in alleyways throughout Birmingham and the UK, found new, vociferous life as it spilled into the written word. Kingdom vs. Empire emerged as an explosive manifesto for politicised faith in 21st Century Britain.

The book reads with the boiled-down intensity of Biblical prophets, painting an apocalyptic social critique and appealing for an integrated spiritual response. No words are wasted.

Fuelled by the theological and philosophical ideas of St Augustine, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Wink, Paulo Freire and Walter Brueggemann, still the book draws overwhelmingly from familiar Biblical texts. Accessible in its universal relevance, it is a book written to awaken the faith of everyday people to action.

This book presents a bleak vision of the social, political and spiritual powers of our time: the society-draining power of our economic system and the sexually oppressive power of our mass culture. Categories of right and left are discarded as defunct. The Biblical categories of Kingdom and Empire are recovered to cast a truer and more empowering light on contemporary British life.