Among the Blasphemers | Gerald Howard For at least a year, the mail room in Penguin’s New York headquarters utilized a bomb-sniffing dog—named, for some unknown reason, Yalta—to screen packages. On one especially unnerving Saturday the fe...

This "journey among the believers & those who were trying, in their imperfect & individual ways, to accommodate and harness symbols of belief towards artistic ends, left this one-time believer engaged & troubled & in fresh perplexity in the best possible way." www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Among the Blasphemers | Gerald Howard For at least a year, the mail room in Penguin’s New York headquarters utilized a bomb-sniffing dog—named, for some unknown reason, Yalta—to screen packages. On one especially unnerving Saturday the fe...

"THE LAST SUPPER really hits its stride & strikes thematic gold in its climactic crypto-religious coverage of two of the central agons of the decade: the AIDS crisis & the publication of THE SATANIC VERSES & the resulting fatwa against Salman Rushdie." www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Among the Blasphemers | Gerald Howard For at least a year, the mail room in Penguin’s New York headquarters utilized a bomb-sniffing dog—named, for some unknown reason, Yalta—to screen packages. On one especially unnerving Saturday the fe...

"As a critic and historian Elie has clarity, depth, and range—qualities that serve him well as he navigates the stormy and turbid high/low waters of his chosen decade’s cultural output" -- from Gerald Howard's review of THE LAST SUPPER in @nplusonemag.com

www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

The God that Failed Up: Review of ‘The Last Supper’ by Paul Elie - Washington Examiner The real thesis of the book is an argument that everyone who approaches the past or the present of art without looking to religion is simply mistaken.

"Accomplishes something remarkable and necessary: <it> foregrounds the extraordinary & ineffable in the popular arts, demonstrating how the 'religious point of view' is deeply entwined with the artistic desires to make sense of the world, or subvert it." www.washingtonexaminer.com/premium/3477...

The Last Supper — how religion shaped pop culture in the 1980s From Madonna to Martin Scorsese, Paul Elie makes the case for spirituality’s influence on American musicians, writers and artists in the decade of materialism

Randy Boyagoda in @FinancialTimes.com: THE LAST SUPPER "challenges reductive perceptions of religion’s place in contemporary American life — as either all-powerful ... or altogether absent ... — while revealing the 1980s as the decade when these perceptions set in place." www.ft.com/content/21f8...

Interview: “The Last Supper” includes struggles of gay Catholics in 1980s New York - Outreach Michael O'Loughlin interviews Paul Elie, author of "The Last Supper," exploring the stories of struggle for gay Catholics in 1980s New York.

“If prominent Catholic leaders had taken a pastoral approach akin to the one Francis took a third of a century later, the situation of Catholicism in our society would be very different today.” My interview with OutReach's @MikeOLoughlin.bsky.social on THE LAST SUPPER outreach.faith/2025/07/inte...

The Reading Life: Paul Elie

Up and out (all this week, it happens): a conversation about THE LAST SUPPER --and its New Orleans episodes, especially -- with the great Susan Larson, for @wwno.org's The Reading Life: www.wwno.org/podcast/the-...

From @thbevilacqua.bsky.social: "With THE LAST SUPPER, Paul Elie has cemented his place as one of the preeminent examiners & historians of art & religion in the modern world & has shown how the latter half of this century is robust with voices speaking to the lived experience of believers . . ."

THE LAST SUPPER, reviewed by Rebecca Bratten Weiss in the National Catholic Reporter (@ncronline.bsky.social): "Elie's exploration of the struggle between art and faith in the 1980s offers valuable insights for anyone seeking clarity on faith in public life today" www.ncronline.org/culture/book....

Paul Elie On Crypto-Religion In Pop Culture His book explores the religious roots of some of the biggest artists of the 1980s. Listen now on the Dishcast.

On the Dishcast, Andrew Sullivan and I talk about THE LAST SUPPER & crypto-religious art, carrying forward a 3-decade exchange--this time from "... Sinead O'Connor’s refusal to get an abortion" to my "gobsmacking omission of the Pet Shop Boys" andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/paul-elie-...

Paul Elie on Culture Wars in Music and Art - Christianity Today What do Andy Warhol, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Flannery O’Connor, and Bono all have in common? According to writer and cultural historian Paul Elie,

Now posted: a full episode of The Russell Moore Show devoted to THE LAST SUPPER - and to THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN, which Moore (@drmoore.bsky.social) says he has read three or four times . . . www.christianitytoday.com/podcasts/the...

Review: The Catholic fragments of art, faith and sex in 1980s pop culture Paul Eli'e's 'The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy' investigates pop culture’s crypto-religious, uncanny symbols of immanence and transcendence.

'Elie’s book seeks to demonstrate just how consistently slanted toward the “crypto-religious” and mystic the American public imaginary has been, even throughout “secular” postmodernity, even by the most rebellious of its rebels for artistic causes.' www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture...

Briefly Noted Book Reviews Short reviews of recent releases.

In @newyorker.com: THE LAST SUPPER "parses not just art works but the uproar that they incited. Conflicts over 'authority and individual conscience' ... didn’t fade with the decade; they helped set the terms of the culture wars that continue into the present." www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

"Elie makes the point that the 1980s culture wars help explain wherever it is that we are today ... In our time of oversimplicity, he reminds us that tearing up a photo of the pope on TV...can have multiple complicated, enigmatic meanings." www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/t...

The Last Supper

"Where the clerics couldn't speak, the artists stepped in." A conversation with the grandmaster interviewer Chris Lydon for Open Source (@radioopensource.bsky.social) is up now -- an afternoon well spent at his home library and studio in Boston radioopensource.org/the-last-sup...

In Rome today I'll have the privilege of leading the keynote conversation in this spring's Georgetown Global Dialogues -- with Cardinal Tolentino, head of the Vatican's Dicastery for Culture and Education globaldialogues.georgetown.edu/events/liter...

Crypto-Religiosity What if American religiosity hasn’t disappeared, but just taken less visible forms?

An invigorating conversation about THE LAST SUPPER and "crypto-religiosity" with old-and-new-friend Dominic Preziosi on the @commonweal.bsky.social podcast . . .

www.commonwealmagazine.org/podcast/cryp...

June Short Fuses — Materia Critica - The Arts Fuse Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

Unerringly thoughtful . . . This is an essential read for those interested in how art can take a stand when spirituality takes the form of a repressive ideology." That's Douglas C. MacLeod, in The Arts Fuse (#ARTSFuse), on THE LAST SUPPER artsfuse.org/310999/june-...

"Elie’s third book is also his most personal: the period under review is one he lived through. The book revisits the 1980s—not as a decade of political conservatism, but as a rich period of spiritual and artistic questioning."--from Nora Futtner's profile berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/visual_stori...

Paul Elie on Art, Faith, and Sex in 1980s America—and the New Pope Nonfiction writer Paul Elie joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s and Pope Leo XIV. Elie comp…

Up too is podcast conversation about THE LAST SUPPER on
@literaryhub.bsky.social: we go into why my generation of Catholics aren't "lapsed" so much as "crypto- religious." lithub.com/paul-elie-on...
. . .

Review | Want to understand today’s culture wars? Look to the 1980s. In “The Last Supper,” Paul Elie explores how controversies over artists like Sinéad O’Connor and Keith Haring paved the way for today’s political and cultural rifts.

The @washingtonpost.com review of THE LAST SUPPER, by Mark Athitakis, is up: "Elie's book feels delightfully comprehensive, shifting from big exemplars of his themes to small representatives of crypto-religiosity": the Pogues, Seamus Heaney, Lucille Clifton ...
washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...

On the Eve of the Conclave, a Peek Inside the Pope’s Last Grand Gathering A cell phone tableau of inclusion and splendor from last year’s synod contrasts the Francis pontificate with this week’s secret meetings to choose his successor.

My latest: a brief reflection, for @vanityfair.com, on a remarkable photograph Fr. James Martin (@jamesmartinsj) took in Rome last October. It's an image of the Catholic future that Pope Francis brought near -- and that the next pope ought to carry forward
www.vanityfair.com/news/story/a...

Catholic Tradition Remains at Pope Francis’s Funeral From the daily newsletter: a dispatch from Vatican City, where the Pope was laid to rest today.

My latest, for @newyorker.com: a personal (& semi-polemical) postcard from Rome, where I was ideally situated on a day for the ages: the day of the funeral for Pope Francis www.newyorker.com/newsletter/t...

In this respect, yesterday's encounter in Rome was telling. The anti-strongman (Francis) -- being an anti-strongman --met graciously with the would-be strongman's henchman (Vance), who had arrived at the Vatican in a neo-imperial thirty-vehicle motorcade out of a circa 1940 newsreel

R.I.P. Jorge Mario Bergoglio -- Pope Francis - 1936-2025. My Postscript essay, for The New Yorker, is below

My latest, for @newyorker.com: With Pope Francis diminished by illness and advancing age and the U.S. bishops timid in their response to the Trump administration's abrupt funding cuts, there's concern for the Church's witness against a vengeful and capricious chief executive . . .

This Easter, with the Pope Ailing, Will the Catholic Church Stand Up to Trump? Pope Francis has long advocated for immigrants, refugees, and the vulnerable—but the Church, like other institutions, may need to find new ways to sustain its commitments.

My latest, for @newyorker.com: With Pope Francis diminished by illness and the U.S. bishops timid in their response to the Trump administration's abrupt funding cuts, there's concern for the Church's witness against a vengeful and capricious chief executive www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Birth of the Culture Wars: PW Talks with Paul Elie The author’s latest book examines the tension between religious and political conservatives and secular popular artists and entertainers in the 1980s.

"An in-depth exploration of a turbulent time in American culture that seemed obsessed with secular freedom...but in fact was shot through with noncanonical religious fervor.” THE LAST SUPPER (@fsgbooks.bsky.social) is out in May. Interview in @PublishersWkly: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

Really pleased to welcome New York Times columnist (and Pulitzer Prize awardee) Carlos Lozada to Old North today -- looking forward to our in-class discussion of THE WASHINGTON BOOK and our public conversation. The latter will begin at 4:30. events.georgetown.edu/humanities/e...

The Pope’s Role Has Changed in Our Time. But Has the Church? A new account of the papacy’s recent history reveals the transformation of the office in the mass-media age.

My latest: an Under Review essay, for @newyorker.com, about a new narrative history of the papacy in our time www.newyorker.com/books/under-...