Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul: A Conversation with Matthew R. Anderson

Our guest on today's episode of What Matters Most, the ninth episode of our second season, is Dr. Matthew Anderson.  

Matthew Anderson holds a Gatto Chair in Christian Studies at St FX in Religious Studies. He is also an affiliate assistant professor at Concordia University, Montreal. Matthew was born to settlers on Treaty 4 territory. His PhD in Religious Studies is from McGill University (1999). His most recent books are Prophets of Love: The Unlikely Kinship of Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul  (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023); The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails (University of Regina Press, 2024); Our Home and Treaty Land (with Ray Aldred, 2022); and Pairings: The Bible and Booze (Novalis, 2021; in French as Apocalypse et gin tonic). Matthew is an ordained Lutheran minister of the ELCIC Eastern Synod. His research interests are Pauline studies, pilgrimage studies, gender, and decolonizing/aware-settler biblical studies. Matthew has walked thousands of kilometres on pilgrimage trails in Europe and North America.

Matthew’s public-facing scholarship has resulted in over 300,000 reads of his articles for Narwhal, The Tyee, Salon, and The Conversation: Canada. In 2020 Matthew was named a  “Newsmaker of the Year” by Concordia University Montreal. Matthew is a recipient of a SSHRC grant for his research “Before the Fact: How Paul’s Rhetoric Made History.” He is also recipient of two Canada Council grants, in 2020-21 and 2021-22, for emerging fiction. In 2016 Matthew was asked by CBC Radio One Montreal for a feature interview as a “Canadian Creative” and asked to share his favourite playlist. The interview can be found here.

Please enjoy our wide-ranging conversation!

What Matters Most is produced by the Centre for Christian Engagement at St Mark’s College, the Catholic college at UBC. The CCE is a centre at St. Mark’s College that explores the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition and seek to learn from others, other Christians, members of other religious traditions, and from those who do not claim any particular or formal religious affiliation.

Since St. Mark’s Centre for Christian Engagement seeks to enable the creation of a culture of encounter and dialogue, let me invite you into that discussion. Send me questions, send me ideas for guests, send me comments. Please follow me on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter @biblejunkies, or on Facebook at Biblejunkies, or on Instagram @stmarkscce. Or email me at jmartens@stmarkscollege.ca. Let me know what you think.

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John W. Martens