Through the Margins: Francis, Leo, and the Crypto-Religious 1980s
Our 7th Annual Wolfe Lecture on Religion and American Politics
Paul Elie
Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs
Respondent: Kim Garcia, Boston College
Date: Tuesday, January 27, 2026
Time: 5:30 - 7pm
Location: Higgins Hall 310 Auditorium
Pope Francis urged Catholics to go to the margins of the institutional church. That's what Paul Elie sought to do with his 2025 book The Last Supper -- by telling the stories of writers, artists, and musicians who made "crypto-religious" work in the 1980s, often at the edges of formal belief. The span of time the book depicts --- the decade of John Paul II's stadium Masses, Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and the AIDS pandemic --- shaped many of the Catholics in the Church Pope Leo XIV now leads. (Strange to say, our new Pope is only three years older than Madonna!) In this lecture, Elie will draw on the book and his writing about the papacy for The New Yorker to consider the ways the recent past influences our tumultous present.
Paul Elie...
Kim Garcia is the author of three books of poetry and a chapbook. Her most recent book is The Brighter House, from White Pine Press. She has received numerous grants and awards including the Tupelo Broadside Prize, The Dogwood Literary Prize, and the Linda Hull Memorial Prize, and her work has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, AGNI, IMAGE and The Kenyon Review, among others.
From 2014 to 2016 she directed the Clough Center Arts & Democracy series, through which she brought to campus artists and writers such as Edward Hirsch, Jill Lepore, Kevin Young, Liza Lou, Lawrence Weschler, Gish Jen, Ramiro Gomez and Eavan Boland for discussions on the role of the arts in sustaining the culture of democracy. In 2021 she worked with the Boisi Center to organize "The Art of Encounter: Catholic Writers on the Margins," a conference featuring writers Alice McDermott, Pádraig Ó Tuama, and R/B Mertz.
Garcia teaches creative writing in the English Department at Boston College.