Ciudad de Dios (City of God) Book

City of God is mosaic in structure and polyphonic in narration. City of God is a piece of postmodern theology and theosophy or of heresy and sacrilege if you please.
"Lord, there is something so exhausted about the NY waterfront, as if the smell of the sea were oil, as if boats were buses, as if all heaven were a garage hung with girlie calendars, the months to come already leafed and fingered in black grease."
The place is New York City.
"Movies are using up the cities, the countrysides, the seas, and the mountains. Someday every inch of the world will be on film. The planet will have flattened into an enormous reel. The night sky will screen us. The film stock will play out and drift and undulate, twist and spiral Möbiusly through the galactic universe. Life will not be simultaneous, it will be sequential, one story after another, story after story, as if all the DNA of every living thing were extended, on one strand, one byte at a time, to infinity."
Style of living is a pop culture movie.
"Pike was a destructive influence. Standing in the pulpit, he cast doubt on Immaculate Conception, the Trinity… it was as if the wretched counterculture had seeped through church walls. But he impressed some seminarians. It's not impossible that Pem has internalized them'his natural father, John, of the historic church, and the maverick adopted father, Jim Pike'and set them against each other. There is your story, there is the conflict if you're looking for one. Or does it sound to you like cheap psychologizing?"
The man is a religious rebel.
"The biblical texts from the beginning were seen as enigmatic, as why would they not be, having been written in a language without vowels or punctuation. And since they were supposed to be divine in their source, and therefore of a supernatural perfection, the scholars, priests, and sages of antiquity felt called upon to explain the contradictions, un-God-like sentiments, unsavory passages, and less than noble acts of noble personages of the stories as well as whatever else could not be countenanced in righteousness… by interpreting them metaphorically, symbolically, or allegorically, or changing their meaning by adding punctuation, or opportunistically applying syntactical emphases, or by otherwise reimagining whatever they felt needed improvement if it was to be truly theologically correct. I was happy that evening to recognize the venerable ancestry of hermeneutics. Beyond that, as a writer, I am only fascinated by the power of this hodgepodge of chronicles, verses, songs, relationships, laws of the universe, sins, and days of reckonings… this scissors-and-paste job that is in its original form so terse, inconsistent, defiant of common sense, and cryptically inattentive to the ordinary demands of narrative as to be attributed to a divine author."
New York City is a grubby antithesis of St. Augustine's City of God and the priests there are spinmeisters serving God as if he were just a cosmic politician.