The author responds.

My article used The Sopranos to argue that Americans are deeply engaged with two interrelated questions: First, what does redemption look like? And second, does it really exist? Season 5 explored several ways of understanding redemption widely available in contemporary culture. It also ruthlessly demolished the hope that any of these contemporary understandings can actually deliver what they promise. In the world of The Sopranos, it's not reasonable to hope for redemption understood in religious terms--no one is going to buy you back from sin and death--and you don't even have the strength to want to be bought back.

Do I agree with this view of the world? No. But I also think most Christians--and most Christian preachers--don't realize just how existentially acute the question of redemption has become in the broader society. In the public square, we Christians have tended to focus on second-order questions of morality, law, and order. Sometimes, we seem to be narrowly concerned with insuring retributive justice--we scarcely speak of mercy or redemption. The Sopranos gives us a world with cosmic retributive justice--but without any hope of redemption. The bottom line is that shows like The Sopranos demonstrate that we can't comfortably assume that the fundamental commitment of the Christian worldview--the belief in the redemption of the world through the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ--is firmly in place, even in a nation whose majority self-identifies as "Christian." We ought to readjust our priorities for evangelization accordingly.

CATHLEEN KAVENY