"It’s key to know who was precisely where precisely when. The controversy over THE SATANIC VERSES broke out in England just a few days after THE LAST TEMPTATION came out ... Basquiat died of an overdose downtown the same day THE LAST TEMPTATION opened in midtown ..." lithub.com/on-group-por...

"So much has been occluded by the depiction of the 1980s as the awful age of Reagan, yuppies, shoulder pads, mullets, and synth-drums. With THE LAST SUPPER I had the sense that I was writing a secret history." - from an exchange with Julia Cooke on @literaryhub.bsky.social lithub.com/on-group-por...

THE LAST SUPPER is just out from Picador: a svelte, stylish paperback, with a new art insert and a back cover full of accolades -- named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times and an Essential Read by The New Yorker. Thanks to all!

My latest -- a piece for The New Yorker (@newyorker.com) about Leo in wartime: In a Lenten season scarred by brutal wars, notably the U.S. and Israel's wars in Iran & Lebanon, the first American Pope is countering the violence through words and symbolic action newyorker.com/news/the-led...

"I’ve been struck by the pertinence of nonfiction books that don’t deal directly with current affairs. These books speak to the moment precisely because they don’t succumb to the presentism, partisanship, and winners-and-losers schemas of the media today." newrepublic.com/article/2076...

My latest: an essay in The New Republic (@newrepublic.com) about our society's urgent and enduring need for narrative nonfiction, a.k.a. literary nonfiction or long fact -- nonfiction that’s based on reportage more than on personal experience or celebrity newrepublic.com/article/2076...

My latest: a short piece for The New Yorker (@newyorker.com) about the new archbishop of New York, Ronald Hicks, what his appointment tells us about Pope Leo -- and what it suggests about the Church's challenge to the Trump administration www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Test-of-concept-like, I read my Profile of Pope Leo in the print edition of The New Yorker (@newyorker.com) over coffee this morning. A dream assignment: to spend part of a year interviewing, thinking, writing, & revising---making work that can be read this way www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

My latest: in @newyorker.com.bsky.social, a Profile of Robert Prevost / Pope Leo XIV www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The Los Angeles Times (@latimes.com) has named THE LAST SUPPER one of its 15 best books of 2025 -- really satisfying to be lauded in such a select group, alongside McEwan, Pynchon, Choi, and Kitamura . . . www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

A next NYC event for THE LAST SUPPER: a reading and conversation next Tuesday, 10/21, at KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, 7:30 p.m., hosted by Commonweal (@commonweal.bskysocial). Come and raise a glass to the crypto-religious in this spirit-haunted house! www.commonwealmagazine.org/crypto-relig...

My latest: a personal essay, in Notre Dame Magazine, about the Roman sojourns of James Joyce and my grand-uncle, Bishop Robert F. Joyce, and the ways they intersect with each other's and my own magazine.nd.edu/stories/amon...

Looking forward to discussing THE LAST SUPPER with the first-class novelist Phil Klay (@philklay.bsky.social) at Fairfield University on Monday, November 17 -- an event in the university's really aptly named Inspired Writers series . . . events.fairfield.edu/event/paul-e...

Thrilled that THE LAST SUPPER is now out as an audiobook from Tantor Media, available on Apple, Audible, and other platforms -- and with a fresh cover featuring Bono, circa mid-eighties, in characteristic cruciform mode books.apple.com/us/audiobook...

Neat to see THE LAST SUPPER in among F. Scott Fitzgerald, Iris Murdoch, James Schuyler, Mary Gaitskill, Jamaica Kincaid, and Drake on Arts & Letters Daily, via Gerald Howard's n+1 review essay www.aldaily.com

Just posted: the video of a LAST SUPPER event at the American Writers Museum (@awmuseum.bsky.social) in Chicago -- really as stimulating a public conversation about my written work as any I can recall. I'm truly grateful for the care taken there www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0VD...

THE LAST SUPPER in Smoky Mountain News: "A deep dive into the music and arts scene of the 1970s and 80s ...You’ll be transported back to that time, that music, those artists and authors and their more transcendental aspects in a kind of illuminating déja vu." smokymountainnews.com/arts/item/40...

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/...

"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/...

"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/...

"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...

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...

“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...

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....

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-...

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...

'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...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

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... . . .

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...

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...

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 . . .

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...

"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...

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-...

.@USCCB has sued the Trump administration over the halt in funding for refugee resettlement: a shrewd move, but one that risks turning the bishops' opposition to mass deportation into a breach-of-contract dispute rather than a Catholic challenge to a grave breach of human dignity