In Sodoms ThresholdThe Desire for the Unthinkable, author Dr. Isaac B. Rosler deconstructs the narrative of Sodom and highlights how religion borrows its fervor and passion from a nonreligious impetus that is not only other than religion but also other than God. He invites us to trespassto think about what has already trespassed our senses and to make sense of an overabundant excess that remains unsacrificable even through ruins, ashes, and forgetfulness. Sodoms Threshold explores concepts of alterity and otherness, and it calls us to think about a space of passion that keeps returning in spite of interruptionsin spite of religious, family, or state mandates that command us not to touch an alterity that has already arrived and is in excess of every touch. The Sodomites forbidden passion is an excess that impassionsit is a surplus that will be usurped and neutralized ad infi nitum by the multiple religions that both rise against its mystery and yet are also founded by it. Though Sodom was erased, its alterity and its surplus are indestructible.

Ezekiel had a vision of God that should cause us in the Church today to fear. In this vision, Ezekiel saw God leaving the temple, the very place where His name was to dwell on the earth. In Ezekiels vision, God did not just leave, He was driven away by what was occurring in the temple and in the hearts of people. In the vision of Ezekiel, after God left the temple, the temple still carried on with its many sacrifices, services, meetings, and functions. However, while the temple continued to function, the presence of God was not a part of the temple activities. Is Ezekiels vision relevant for us today? When you consider that many, if not all, the same practices which drove God out of the temple are occurring within the Church today, the answer is yes. Thus, Ezekiels vision of God leaving the temple is of utmost importance for us today. What we have to understand is that the functioning of both the temple in Ezekiels day and the Church today is no evidence of the presence of God amongst us. Because of what is occurring within the Church today, we are left with this: Is God leaving the church or has God already left?

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A former high school teacher, Ogbu-Agu Ejiakor travels to Lagos seeking greener pastures. He lands the most coveted of jobs with the Central Bank of Nigeria as a file clerk. On the first day in his new job, he runs into an old friend: the incredibly gorgeous Nkechi Enyinnaya. Neither of their lives will ever be the same. Nkechi Enyinnaya is the Chief Accounting Officer at the big house ,and she has a bizarre story to tell about those in power. When she finds Mr. Ejiakor in one of the offices of the department she heads, Nkechi is distraught, believing that a miracle has happened. In her mind, she has found the one person with whom to share her burden. Her job is to make sure that the ruling despot has his foreign deposits serviced every day with money from oil receipts or boxes of cash taken from the treasury. Nkechi sees an opening and exploits the situation. As the two brainless, gavel-headed army generals rob the people with malice, and with wanton cruelty, Nkechi does likewise—only hers is a grand, futuristic scheme. Frustrated by a system that is badly damaged by corruption, she enlisted her old friend in her dangerous game.

The biblical story of the destruction of Sodom has inspired countless literary visions. The city has elicited writing from Milton, Sade, Proust, Dostoevsky and Tournier, among others. This work contains an anthology of Sodom texts spanning several centuries. Paul Hallam has also provided his own reading of these languages of prejudice, obsession and desire in an extensive essay.

“Widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century,” this French coming-of-age story in the tradition of philosophical fiction (Harold Bloom, literary critic). Sodom and Gomorrah is the fourth volume of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, and the last publication from the French literary classic that Proust was able to preside over before his death in 1922. Touching on homosexuality for the first time, Sodom and Gomorrah is also a penetrating, often comic portrayal of French high society as well as a metaphysical exploration of the nature of time, memory, art, love, and death. “Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that!” —Virginia Woolf “The greatest fiction to date.” —W. Somerset Maugham “Proust is the greatest novelist of the 20th century.” —Graham Greene

SEVEN YEARS IN SODOM SEVEN FRANCISCO, AN URBAN MISSION REVEALS: - A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF AN URBAN MISSIONARY AND HIS FAMILY. - A HISTORY OF THE CITY AND ITS CHURCHES - A RISE AND FALL OF MANY. - A PLANTING OF A CHURCH - A PATHWAY FEW WOULD DARE TROD. - A DIVIDED CITY - A CHOICE AND A CALL. - A LOOK AT ITS BEAUTY AND ITS DARKSIDE. - A VIEW OF THE CITY'S HEART OR PERHAPS THAT OF A NATION. - A FAITHFUL GOD IN THE MIDST OF HIS PEOPLE. AS TOLD BY THE FORMER "CHAPLAIN OF BROADWAY"

According to Fields, biblical narrative is didactic socio-religious commentary on human experience, reflected in 'history', and that such 'history' is a way of describing the conceptual universe of the ancient authors. Biblical narrative is strikingly free of abstract formulations but encapsulates abstract reflections, within recurring literary motifs, and by the reporting of 'historical information'. This perception of biblical narrative is strikingly illustrated by an analysis of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19). The motifs of the Sodom tradition are compared with those in the stories about the concubine in Gibeah (Judges 19) and about the destruction of Jericho (Joshua 2).

I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909)