From the back cover: "We live in the most brutal century in human history, but instead of stepping forward to to take the credit, the devil has been rendered himself invisible. The very notion of evil seems to be incompatible with modern life, from which the ideas of transgression and the accountable self are fast receding. Yet despite the loss of old words and moral concepts -- Satan, sin, evil -- we cannot do without some conceptual means for thinking about the universal human experience of cruelty and pain. [Delbanco's] driving motive in writing this book has been the conviction that if evil, with all its insidious complexity, escapes the reach of our imagination, it will have established dominion over us all.