Is There God After Prince? Icons in an Age of Last Things with Peter Coviello

What can it mean to love the things we love (books, records, people) in a time of disaster, an era of ends? How do our icons speak to us—what news can they deliver—during planet-sized calamity? Taking a cue from the death of Prince, the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, this lecture considers the icon as a herald of possibilities lying just beyond the secular perimeter of the knowable and known. All manner of things find us through our icons. This talk wonders over the fate of our devotion to them in this time of crisis and collapse—an age of Last Things.

Author and professor of English Peter Coviello is the author of six books, including “Make Yourselves Gods,” a finalist for the 2020 John Whitmer Historical Association Best Book Prize. His newest book, “Is There God After Prince? Dispatches from an Age of Last Things,” was selected for The Millions’ ‘Most Anticipated’ list for 2023.