CITY OF GOD (A book report) E.L. Doctorow         The book begins in a way that compels my attention and reading—with cosmology. Where did the universe come from, when and how? I am intrigued by astronomy. I don’t learn anything new, but I like reading about it.         But the subject jumps from cosmology to a personality. Just when I’m getting interested in this personality, here comes another paragraph about the universe…”a small and obscure accident occurs, a chance array of carbon and nitrogen atoms that fuse into molecular existence as a single cell…” and we have perspective again.         I am further compelled when I hear of Pem, an Episcopal clergy type of free spirit, liberal bent—“My man was Tillich, though some would stick me with Jim Pike.” Many would say that Paul Tillich was the most important theologian of the 20th Century, and that Bishop Pike was the most radical of Episcopalians. Remember “Honest to God?”          We follow Pem through the mystery of a stolen cross, through the streets of New York, with introductions to a woman of interest as well as other people along the streets. I begin to catch on that the “City of God” is going to be New York City.         I’m just getting into the swing of the city when Doctorow sends me back to the “uncounted billions of years” during which life existed only as a single-cell organism as it goes through its slow evolution.         Back just as suddenly to the city streets and people and the makings for a sermon. His freewheeling mind raises the basic questions. “How do we distinguish our truth from another’s falsity, we of the true faith, except by the story we cherish? Our story of God…To presume to contain God in this Christian story of ours, to hold Him, circumscribe Him, the author of everything we can conceive and everything we cannot conceive…in our story of Him? Of Her? OF WHOM? What in the name of Christ do we think we are talking about?” (p.15)         Hints of a Bishop unhappy about this theology being preached at St. Timothy’s, further reports of the search for the missing cross (a metaphor?), then we’re back to searching for the elusive neutrino, then on a poetic/musical interlude, then to Einstein who ties physics to God. “Albert thought of his work in physics as tracking God, as if God lived in gravity, or shuttled between the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force, or could be seen now and then indolently moving along at one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second…not exactly the concerned God people pray to or petition, but hell, it’s a start, it’s something, if not everything we have if we want to be true to ourselves.” (p. 25)         The cross is found, (of course!) on the roof above the Synagogue. The Holocaust is revisited in the context of cosmos and theology.          It’s the kind of book every preacher should have to read before laying out pronouncements of faith and doctrine. It was sent to me by a non-preacher, non-theologian who found that it spoke to her in ways she never heard from religious professionals.          Of course the good Reverend lost his position at St. Timothy’s, but not his place in the city, the City of God.         It was New York Times best seller in 2000. As the Wall Street Journal review stated: “A grander perspective on the universe…a novel that sets its sights on God.”  —  Art Morgan, Summer 2001