Ed Simon, Editor-in-Chief: Who doesn’t love the Mary Lambert-directed music video to Madonna’s 1989 single “Like a Prayer?” Well, the Vatican (at the time) for one, and all those thirsty consumers who boycotted Pepsi because of the song’s use in a commercial, but I’m nostalgic for the era in which the Material Girl could still court controversy. Remember it now: the flashing images of stigmata and icons, of relics and saints, the burning crosses, the Black Jesus, the overt sexuality, all of that bottled religious eroticism. The agony and ecstasy in the truest form. True to her name, Madonna was aways an explicitly Catholic artist (dalliances with Kabbalah aside) where the visual image of Lambert’s video owes much to that specifically Italian iconography of Madonna Louise Ciccone’s upbringing. Who doesn’t have love for the Millennial Lady Gaga or the Zoomer Chappell Roan, but when it comes to the intermingling of the sacred and the profane, Madonna still does it best.
“Like a Prayer” was part of a strange moment in American popular culture when transgressive artists across mediums – musicians, directors, authors, painters – began exploring the contradictions and complexities of faith, of the transcendence inherent in transgression. That’s why I’m incredibly excited to spend this Advent season reading Paul Elie’s new The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. A New Yorker contributor and a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, Elie is most famous as the author of The Life Which You Save May be Your Own where he provided a group portrait of pious and radical Catholic renegades that included Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy. In The Last Supper he will hopefully take that same sensibility, that very Catholic manner of being able to see the beauty in the stars while laying in the gutter, in his examination of this micro-moment of what he calls the “crypto-religious.”
During the 80s, when the Downtown scene was marred by AIDS and crack, as well as the emergence of predatory finance which altered the entire urban fabric, and the national scene was dominated by the bellicose closing days of the Cold War and the emergence of the nihilistic evangelical Christian far-right, a group of assorted artists explored faith’s radical potential, albeit in its most extreme and conflicting manifestations. Often, though not exclusively, Catholic artists, this work ranged from the provocation of Andres Serano’s Piss Christ to the Ruthenian-inflected late religious works of Andy Warhol, the borderline blasphemy of former seminarian Martin Scorsese’s brilliant The Last Temptation of Christ and the Jewish-Buddhist prophet Leonard Cohen’s incantatory hymn “Hallelujah,” for which despite all of the subsequent overplaying hasn’t been able to have had the tenor of its trembling and awestruck beauty fully erased. These were artists who “tested boundaries between sex and the sacred; they explored the controverted nature of religion… with an intensity seldom seen before or since.”
Shanzeh Afzal, Managing Editor: Over the past few months, I’ve been reading and learning from Indigenous scholars, drawn especially to their ways of understanding relationships with the land, with non-human beings, and with one another. These perspectives feel grounding and expansive, offering ways of thinking that challenge dominant Western ideas of separation and ownership. As the year winds down and the holidays approach, I’m excited to spend time with Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist whose writing weaves science, Indigenous knowledge, and personal reflection with remarkable care. Published in 2013, the book has long been on my list, and it feels like the right moment to finally slow down and read it.
Earlier this year, my first read of 2025 was Kimmerer’s shorter book, The Serviceberry. Though brief, it left a lasting impression. In it, Kimmerer reflects on reciprocity, gift economies, and the lessons offered by the natural world, using the serviceberry as both a teacher and a metaphor. The book encouraged me to rethink ideas of value, abundance, and responsibility, not just in ecological terms but in how we relate to one another in everyday life.
Reading Braiding Sweetgrass now feels like a natural continuation of that experience, and also a return. Ending the year with one of Kimmerer’s books, after beginning the year with another, feels full circle in a quiet, meaningful way.
Sarah Steinberg, Associate Editor for Essays: Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks: I’ll be spending the holidays in New England, so I picked up this novel by Martha’s Vineyard author Geraldine Brooks. The book tells the story of coming to the New World through the fictional lens of a real historical figure. I’m especially excited to read it after learning about the “invention of America” in a special literature course during my final semester at Carnegie Mellon.
Christopher Shaberg, Columnist: Let’s see if I can tell you briefly about what I’ve been reading lately, and heading into the holidays. Unfortunately I don’t have one book to talk about because, well, it splintered off. I had been working my way through Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars for a while, when I was triggered by some enigmatic thing (AI related, I think, after rewatching Spike Jonze’s Her) to revisit Philip K. Dick’s book Time Out of Joint, which I read and taught in 2009 but barely remembered anything about, once I started into it again; this coincided with an encounter with Leonora Carrington’s Down Below (which I spotted at Barnes & Noble, at random, and bought), but Dick’s weird novel also redirected me back to Fredric Jameson’s essay (“Nostalgia for the Present“), and this plus Carrington’s story also got me thinking about Octavia Butler’s Dawn again. I am trying to write an essay about simulacrum, self-expression, and the fate of writing in the accelerating age of AI, but it’s not going particularly well!
Asia Thompson, Associate Editor of Interviews: Over the holidays, I’ll be reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste. This book had been on my TBR list for years, and when I found the copy at my local bookstore, I swiped it up immediately. I’ve been wanting to expand my personal knowledge and history about the caste systems in the U.S. and I’ve heard how Wilkerson adds personal narrative and an optimistic call to action. Very excited to see what she has to say.
Mason Stockstill, Columnist: I’m currently hate-listening to Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid, a poorly written, clichéd, predictable novel that is far and away the most popular book in America since its release in 2022. I struggle to decipher its popularity; it would barely pass muster as a treatment for a Lifetime original movie, the obvious prototype. But The Housemaid flips the script on such domestic thrillers, which typically portray a nuclear family threatened by an outsider in the form of a nanny or adopted child (think The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Orphan, or even M3gan). Here it is the outsider that is the victim and the family the threat. Perhaps this reversal fits into a political zeitgeist where support for seemingly foundational ideas is shakier than presumed, and “the family is a locus of safety” could be the next “the president is not a king.” But I could be completely wrong—there are several hours left on my audiobook.
