Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Elie (Reinventing Bach), a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, probes the origins of the American culture wars in this detailed if oblique history. At the center of his account are the so-called "controverts" who used "crypto-religious" language, tropes, and images to undermine traditional religious beliefs in the 1980s. They include Andy Warhol, who expressed his complicated religious identity in silkscreen prints of apostles and Brillo boxes, the latter of which played on Catholic-inflected notions of the "ordinary as holy," according to Elie. Also spotlighted are Madonna, who embodied a "struggle with traditional female ideals--of womanhood and motherhood, of virtue and erotic power," and Martin Scorsese, whose long-delayed The Last Temptation of Christ cut against Christian ideas that Christ's teachings were self-evident without historical interpretation. Elie situates this artistic ferment against the backdrop of an American Christian culture and a Catholic church that was grappling with sexual abuse within its ranks as well as the AIDS crisis. In the process, he probes how artists and popular culture understood and reacted to shifting currents of "authority and individual conscience," devotion and desire, and institutional hypocrisy. While the implications of those questions are fascinating and the individual artist profiles are vivid, Elie struggles to slot the book's various elements into a cohesive argument. It adds up to an intriguing yet disorganized portrait of a tumultuous decade. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Elie (Berkley Ctr. for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown Univ.; The Life You Save May Be Your Own) seeks to understand the ways in which religious ideals find expression in literature, arts, music, and culture, particularly of the 1980s. His book is mostly a group portrait of four 20th-century Catholic writers--Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day--but he is eager to show how the many other artists who people this story (musicians including Sinead O'Connor, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, the Neville Brothers, and Leonard Cohen; writers, including William Kennedy, Toni Morrison, and Czewslaw Milosz, along with visual artists such as Andy Warhol) all brought important Catholic insights into their work during this time. Readers interested in the subject might also consider Erika Doss's Spiritual Moderns, although Elie casts a wider net. VERDICT Readers may not always agree with Elie's contentions in this fascinating, well-written book, but they will never be bored.--Ellen Gilbert
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An analysis of popular culture's incorporation of religious elements. In 1979, when Bob Dylan released the albumSlow Train Coming, fans felt betrayed that an "un-cooptable" rebel had become a born-again Christian, "marking his conversion with a set of songs dealing with spiritual warfare and holy submission." He performed selections onSaturday Night Live, 13 years before Sinéad O'Connor sang Bob Marley's "War" on SNL and infamously ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II. Those two performances bracketed a moment in which "figures in what we call popular culture engaged questions of faith and art and the ways they fit together with an intensity seldom seen before or since." In this all-encompassing book, Elie documents the achievements of a range of artists from popular music, cinema, literature, and more whose work during that period, primarily the 1980s, was "crypto-religious," a term coined by Czeslaw Milosz that Elie uses to mean "work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief." Among the artists he cites are Andy Warhol, whose work, Elie argues, "put him squarely in a line of twentieth-century writers and artists with Christian preoccupations"; U2, the Irish band whose "mix of devotion and desire came together inThe Unforgettable Fire," their 1984 album; Madonna, who "made old-school Catholicism suddenly, inexplicably sexy"; and filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who devoted 15 years to making 1988'sThe Last Temptation of Christ, with its depiction of a fallible Jesus, which provoked a backlash from religious conservatives. The writing can be dry, but there's enough entertaining material to keep readers interested, as when Elie notes that Universal Studios was so concerned about protestors when they showedLast Temptation to clergymen in New York that, before the screening, they "had the cinema inspected by men with walkie-talkies crawling down the aisles, looking for explosives under the seats." A thought-provoking evaluation of religious-themed art of the 1980s. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
