1980s
A01=Paul Elie
American history
Andy Warhol
art history
Author_Paul Elie
Category=AGR
Category=QRA
Category=QRAX
Category=QRMB1
cultural criticism
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
faith
forthcoming
Madonna
nonfiction
religion
secular age
Product details
- ISBN 9781250437938
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 135 x 208mm
- Publication Date: 22 Jun 2026
- Publisher: St Martin's Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 The Last Supper 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 The Last Temptation of Christ—a struggle that anticipates Salman Rushdie’s struggle with Islam in The Satanic Verses.
The Last Supper explores the bold and unexpected forms an encounter with belief can take. It traces the beginnings of our postsecular age, in which religion is at once surging and in decline. Through a propulsive narrative, it reveals the crypto-religious imagination as complex, credible, daring, and vividly recognisable.
Paul Elie is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003) and Reinventing Bach: The Search for Transcendence in Sound (2012), both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. He is a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn
