One evening in the early 1970s two men faced each other in the White House. One was President Richard Nixon; the other was a teenager named Arnold Davidson, who was performing magic for the Nixon administration. Both of their careers would soon change drastically: one went on to live in infamy; the other, to a career of philosophy and religious studies. Davidson wasn’t long for the magic game, nor did he follow his other equally plausible ambition, a career as a professional jazz drummer. Instead, after an injury to his hand, and then after less than one semester as an undergraduate, he leapt right into graduate school, where he worked with and befriended colossal thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

Davidson is a Professor in the Divinity School and Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago and in the Philosophy Department at the University of Pisa, the executive editor of Critical Inquiry, the English-language editor of Michel Foucault’s “Lectures,” the author of The Emergence of Sexuality, a former Guggenheim Fellow, and a remarkably affable guy. He speaks French, Italian, Spanish, English, and Portuguese, and is studying Catalan. He shouldn’t be so easy to talk to. But he is.

I spoke to him by telephone at his home in Chicago. Our conversation began with some light banter about the stigmata as theological vindication, “conceptual history,” monsters moral and physical and, oh, bestiality and sadism, before it subtly became apparent that all that stuff about nineteenth-century perversion was quite relevant—perhaps mandatory—to current conversations about homosexuality, gay marriage, and the strange commingling of politics and theology.

—Benjamin Cohen

I. JESUS BURRITO

THE BELIEVER: How did you get interested in the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi? This seems like such an unusual example for research.

ARNOLD DAVIDSON: I was at the time interested in historical studies of monsters and monstrosities, which offered a view into emotions of horror. But I also wanted to look into a case where the emotion was the opposite—that is, an emotion of wonder. I had gone to Italy once on vacation and liked it very much, and at the same time I became very interested in St. Francis of Assisi, an example of a lot of different kinds of artistic, theological, and literary innovations. I actually spent about four summers throughout Italy, mainly in Tuscany and Umbria, seeking out every painting of St. Francis for the first hundred years after his life. Which meant that I visited many towns that even many Italians have never been to.

BLVR: What were the philosophical questions you were after?

AD: With the case of the stigmata, we have a situation of conflicting explanations,...