Washington Post Book Review: “Want to understand today’s culture wars? Look to the 1980s.”

Paul Elie’s new book, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s traces the cultural expressions that helped to create the divisiveness and the culture wars found in today’s religion and politics.

Like his two earlier books, The Life You Save May be Your Own and Reinventing Bach, Elie plumbs a specific era, in this case the grand and the minor events of the 1980s, to offer commentary on our current times. From Bob Dylan’s Gotta Serve Somebody to Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Andy Warhol’s The Last Supper, Elie explores radical expressions of religiosity that shook things up so much that they helped launch the reactionary, divisive era we find ourselves in today.

Read The Washington Post’s review by Mark Athitakis here.

Paul’s Artist Telling Stories podcast can be found here.