In his new book, Profaning Paul, USC Professor Cavan Concannon takes an unflinching look at the letters of Paul through the metaphor of excrement--or shit.
"The letters of Paul have been used to support and condone a host of evils over the span of more than two millennia: racism, slavery, imperialism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism, to name a few. Following the lead of feminist, queer, and minoritized scholarship, Profaning Paul asks what would happen if we stopped recycling Paul’s writings. By profaning the status of his letters as sacred texts, we might open up new avenues for imagining political figurations to meet our current and coming political, economic, and ecological challenges.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am faculty at University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB.
And I'm joined today by Dr. Kevin Concanon, who is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California.
And before just letting everybody know about all your accolades and great things, I'll just say, Kevin, thanks for joining me.
It's great to be here.
Thanks for having me.
So you are by training a biblical scholar have written some, some very what I would call focused works on, you know, biblical literature, assembling early Christianity trade networks in the letters of Dionysius of Corinth.
When you were Gentiles specters of ethnicity in a Roman Corinth and Paul's Corinthians.
Correspondence.
And so I love having biblical scholars like you on because there is no more greater street cred than the biblical scholar who digs into scripture as a profession.
You are also somebody working on an amazing project with Jill Hicks Keaton.
On the Museum of the Bible, we've had Jill on and just can't wait to sort of, you know, see that project appear in the world and hopefully have both of you back to talk about it and dig into the very strange and peculiar phenomenon that is the Museum of the Bible.
Associate Professor at USC, as I mentioned, I have to ask this question as somebody who grew up a UCLA fan.
You did your undergrad at UCLA.
You now teach at USC.
What kind of like dissonance, do you just feel a dissonance every day of your life?
Do you just feel like a sort of traitorous, you know, identity?
I mean, are you okay?
How does that work for you?
The way I think of it is I'm taking USC's money and doing evil with it.
And, uh, and I, I tell my students that I will never root for their team.
Roof for the Bruins.
All right.
True and true.
The interview can continue.
Good.
All right.
That was the right answer.
So we're going to keep going with the interview and not shut it down.
That's good stuff.
You also have in your Twitter bio, I usually don't do these personal questions.
I apologize, but I'm very sleep deprived.
And so you're getting these personal thoughts of mine.
Your Twitter bio talks about how you've gone Hollywood at USC.
And I just want to say that I cannot, I have never met somebody with the more perfect name to be the professor of religion in Hollywood than Cavan Concanon, it's just like a match made in heaven, like when I picture your day I picture you in the, in the morning, translating Greek, writing some incredibly, you know, Technical text on Paul.
And then in the evening, just holding like a really nice glass of bourbon while, you know, talking to Hollywood elite behind closed doors somewhere and just leading this life of glamour.
Is that basically how it goes or am I wrong?
Oh, absolutely.
That's absolutely it.
No.
Whether it were so, I would love that to be the case.
But yeah, no, I live a much more boring life than that.
All right, enough of my nonsense.
We are here to talk about your book, which is an absolutely fascinating book, and that is Profaning Paul.
And I just want to read a little bit of the description because, friends, I have to say, I do this a lot.
You hear me on this show a couple times a week.
I read a lot of books for this show.
And this is an incredibly unique piece of work.
It's just not something that fits into some of the types and the tropes that we expect in academic writing, especially from a scholar of the Bible.
So here's the description of the book.
The letters of Paul have been used to support and condone a host of evils over the span of more than two millennia.
Racism, slavery, imperialism, and so on.
But And in some cases, folks have felt compelled to reappropriate Paul's letters to fit liberal or radical politics.
However, Kevin Kankana argues that we should not do that.
Instead of trying to rehabilitate Paul, quote, following the lead of feminist, queer, and minoritized scholarship, profaning Paul asks, what would happen if we stopped recycling Paul's writings?
So I, again, will just say, more nonsense for me, I have many friends who are scholars of the Bible.
I love them.
They're amazing.
And they usually are not my friends who are the risk takers.
I'm just not going to lie.
They're like my friends who are really good at careful, detailed analysis.
You talk to your friend George, who's a biblical scholar, and he spent the last 25 years on You know, Colossians chapter three kind of situation.
And then I read your book and I'm like, holy moly, you are going for it.
You are saying, okay, for hundreds of pages that we should use the metaphor of human excrement, shit, to understand Paul and how we should react to him.
And so I want to read a little bit from your book in a minute, but you begin the whole text in a first century bathroom.
It's a vivid and unnerving scene.
It puts it all out there, just to sort of put it metaphorically and literally.
Why start here in trying to get us into a certain perspective on the Apostle Paul?
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