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14
FRIDAY
“Wait! Lemme rewind it. OK, what’s that?” I pointed to a blue-and-tan oblong on the wall in a scene from King of the Hill. “Footprints in the Sand,” Rebecca replied. Without text to go on, my wife and I had each identified the plaque. If you, too, enjoy spotting incidental religious kitsch (punch line: “That was when I carried you.”) by iconography alone, you’ll love Colleen McDannell’s 1995 Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America, a fascinating study of the way Americans have made clothing, prints, and trinkets articles of faith. Today, the author, a University of Utah professor who also co-wrote Heaven: A History, discusses “Material Culture and American Catholic History” as part of Catholic University’s “The American Catholic Experience: From Race Relations to the Cold War” lecture series. Bring a Thermos of Lourdes water and enjoy a pause that refreshes at 4 p.m. at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, 3600 John McCormack Rd. NE. FREE. (202) 319-5484. (Glenn Dixon)