Author Description

<p><b>Named a Best Book of the Year by the <i>Washington Post </i>and <i>Los Angeles Times</i> | Named an Essential Read by <i>The New Yorker </i><br></b><br>This enthralling group portrait brings to life a moment when popular culture became the site of religious strife—strife that set the stage for some of the most salient political and cultural clashes of our day. <br><br>Circa 1980, tradition and authority are in the ascendant, both in Catholicism (via Pope John Paul II) and in American civic life (through the Moral Majority and the so-called televangelists). But the public is deeply divided on issues of body and soul, devotion and desire. <br><br>Enter the figures Paul Elie calls “crypto-religious.” Here is Leonard Cohen writing “Hallelujah” on his knees in a Times Square hotel room; Andy Warhol adapting Leonardo’s<i> The Last Supper</i> in response to the AIDS pandemic; Prince making the cross and altar into “signs o’ the times.” Through Toni Morrison, spirits speak from the grave; Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen deepen the tent-revival intensity of their work; Wim Wenders offers an angel’s-eye view of Berlin; U2, the Neville Brothers, and Sinéad O’Connor reckon with their Christian roots in music of mystic yearning. And Martin Scorsese overcomes fundamentalist ire to make <i>The Last Temptation of Christ</i>—a struggle that anticipates Salman Rushdie’s struggle with Islam in <i>The Satanic</i> <i>Verses</i>. <br><br>In Elie’s acclaimed first book, <i>The Life You Save May Be Your Own</i>, Catholic writers ventured out into the wilds of postwar America; in this book, creative figures who were raised religious go to the margins of conventional belief, calling forth controversy. Episodes such as the boycott sparked by Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video and the tearing-up of Andres Serrano’s <i>Piss Christ</i> in Congress are early skirmishes in the culture wars—but here the creators (not the politicians) are the protagonists, and the work they make speaks to confl