Who Gets a Seat at the Last Supper?

Paul Elie’s new book is a Catholic’s attempt to critique his own faith, through the art of Warhol, Madonna, and others
By Blake Smith

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Podcast

Arc: The Podcast

Every other week, Arc Magazine's editor-in-chief, Mark Oppenheimer, is joined by guests to talk religion, politics, et cetera.

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Podcast

Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

For decades, klezmer musicians have kept traditional Jewish music alive despite war, genocide, and erasure. They’ve done so by playing a small handful of surviving songs again and again. Many more songs—a trove of tunes with the potential to redefine the genre—have sat just out of reach, in a former Soviet archive. This music was unseen, unheard, unknown. But now, newly rescued, it’s transforming the klezmer world, the people who work in it, and our picture of 20th-century Jewish life in a destabilized Europe. Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer tells the story of that music.

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Letters to the Editor

Tolkien and the Tech World

 To the Editor: Related to Lee Konstantinou's essay on the influence of Tolkien's work on the tech world, I have been maintaining a list for a couple years called Tech of the Rings. It's an ever-growing collection of tech companies with names inspired by The Lord of the Rings and the Tolkien legendarium, from Palantir to Valinor. While many of these are names one might associate with the “good guys,” it is quite surprising that there are actually companies that have the…

The Jesus-Loving Rabbi of Litchfield County

By Gabby Deutch
Here’s a picture familiar to most Jews: it’s Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. A Torah reader clad in white ascends to the front of the sanctuary to chant the story of the scapegoat, the biblical tale in which a goat bearing the sins of the Jewish people is sent into the wilderness to its death. On the somber Day of Atonement, Jews listen to this story of sacrifice and sin, read in Hebrew from the Book of Leviticus, as they consider the ways they have done wrong in the prior year.  What is never part of that…

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What had you thought Opus Dei was?
Gareth Gore: To the public, Opus Dei presents a veneer. It pretends that it is simply a religious organization that wants to help Catholics live out their faith more deeply. But thanks to speaking to people who’d lived inside the organization, and thanks in particular to these secret documents that were smuggled out of the organization, I now understand Opus Dei to be something completely different. Opus Dei for me is a deeply political, a deeply reactionary, organization that aims to infiltrate society at the very highest levels. Infiltrating governments, the judiciary, the upper echelons of the business world. And using its influence in those parts of society to push its reactionary agenda, to turn back the clock on the sexual revolution, contraception, affirmative action.