Matt Sheedy is Visiting Assistant Professor of North American Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. His reach focuses on the borders of religion and secularism as they play out in news media, pop culture, and political spheres. His teaching and research engages these questions in relation to Muslim, atheist, Christian, and Indigenous communities in North America. His recent book is Owning the Secular: Religious Symbols, Culture Wars, Western Fragility (Routledge, 2021). His current book project is called Islam According to Google News: How Media Shape the Way We Talk About Religion, also with Routledge.
Join Matt Sheedy and Charles McCrary as they discuss a cultural history of "sincerely held religious beliefs." McCrary explores how SCOTUS has determined who and what gets to count as 'religious' and traces the historical development of American secularism. Be sure to tune in!
Join Matt Sheedy, Tyler Tully, and host Candace Mixon as they discuss the ramifications of the in-progress Supreme Court case Groff vs. Dejoy, the Catholic Church’s decision to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery, and a recent controversial tweet by the conservative media pundit, Ann Coulter. In threading these discussions together, they consider religion as negotiated in the public sphere and the limits of accommodations across religious boundaries.
In this response to our episode with Khurram Hussain, Matt Sheedy situates Hussain's work and outlines the usefulness of Hussain’s ‘critical humanist approach’. Sheedy then furthers the conversation by posing some questions about the implications of this approach and how it might translate to other disciplines.
In this episode, Matt Sheedy joins RSP co-editor Andie Alexander to discuss his recent book Owning the Secular: Religious Symbols, Culture Wars, Western Fragility and unpack common assumptions about secularism and religion in the public sphere.
In this podcast we have a group discussion about Russell McCutcheon's new book, Religion in Theory and Practice: Demystifying the Field for Burgeoning Academics. Joining us on the podcast is not only the author himself, but two young scholars who also contributed to the book, Matt Sheedy and Tara Baldrick-Marone.
The North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) held its annual meeting last week in connection with the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) conference in Atlanta, GA. Conference report for The Religious Studies Project by Matt Sheedy.The theme for this year’s NAASR panels was “,” which aimed to signal a basic problem in the study of religions;
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