Profaning Paul

Across two thousand years, the letters of Paul have been cited to justify racism, slavery, imperialism, misogyny and antisemitism. This book reexamines that record. Many later readers have responded by trying to salvage the letters for liberal or radical causes, hoping to undo harms committed in Paul's name.

The study begins with the letters' vocabulary of dung, refuse and waste, and traces how that crude imagery is reused and reshaped in later interpretation. It asks why such diverse readers, from liberal churchgoers to professional biblical scholars, political theorists and philosophers, keep casting Paul as a hero whose words hold wisdom worth mining.

Drawing on feminist, queer and minoritized scholarship, the author asks what would follow if interpreters stopped recycling these writings. By stripping Paul's letters of their status as sacred texts, the book suggests, we might open new ways of imagining political possibilities for the present and future political, economic and ecological challenges we face.