Rebel with a cause: Remembering Sinead O’Connor

Sinead O’Connor wasn’t easy to put in a box. Rock, reggae, psalms: She sang it all. And her spirituality was no less complex.

For years, the Irish singer’s public image was tied to her controversial appearance on the “Saturday Night Live” TV show in 1992, when she tore up a photo of the pope as a protest against sex abuse in the Catholic Church. By the time she died this week, though – 31 years later – many admirers saw her as something of a prophet, raising awareness of a crisis that was little talked about at the time.

Throughout her career, O’Connor remained fiercely critical of the church. Yet she openly loved other aspects of faith, always searching toward something transcendent in her music. It was a kind of “rescuing God from religion,” as she once told an interviewer.

Catholicism scholar Brenna Moore traces the myriad spiritual themes in O’Connor’s work, from an album based on the Hebrew Bible to Rastafarianism and the singer’s later conversion to Islam. “Yet O'Connor’s vision was not fragmented, as if she were constantly chasing after bits and pieces,” Moore writes. “The miracle of Sinead O’Connor is that it all coheres.”

This week we also like articles about the growing commercialization of Paganism, Soviet nuclear espionage and the people who officiate at the weddings of their friends and relatives.