Our 7th Annual Wolfe Lecture on Religion and American Politics

Paul Elie
Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs

Respondent: Kim Garcia, Boston College

Pope Francis urged Catholics to go to the margins of the institutional church. That's what Paul Elie sought to do with his 2025 book The Last Supper -- by telling the stories of writers, artists, and musicians who made "crypto-religious" work in the 1980s, often at the edges of formal belief. The span of time the book depicts --- the decade of John Paul II's stadium Masses, Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and the AIDS pandemic --- shaped many of the Catholics in the Church Pope Leo XIV now leads. (Strange to say, our new Pope is only three years older than Madonna!) In this lecture, Elie will draw on the book and his writing about the papacy for The New Yorker to consider the ways the recent past influences our tumultous present.