Paul Elie

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor, a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; and Walker Percy, a doctor in Louisiana who had quit medicine in order to write. Although they never met as a group, for three decades they read one another's work, corresponded, and grappled...

Circa 1980, tradition and authority are in the ascendant, both in Catholicism (via Pope John Paul II) and in American civic life (through the Moral Majority and the so-called televangelists). But the public is deeply divided on issues of body and soul, devotion and desire. Enter the figures Paul Elie calls "crypto-religious." Here is Leonard Cohen writing "Hallelujah" on his...