Matthew R. Anderson

Matthew Anderson holds a Gatto Chair in Christian Studies at St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia where he teaches New Testament; Pauline studies; Bible and Film; Religion & Environment; history of asceticism; ancient masculinities). 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 | New Testament is from McGill University (1999). His books are The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails (University of Regina Press, 2024); Our Home and Treaty Land, Revised and Expanded Edition (with Ray Aldred, Friesen, 2024) Prophets of Love: The Unlikely Kinship of Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023); Our Home and Treaty Land: Walking our Creation Story (with Ray Aldred, WoodLake Books, 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 current research interests are Paul with Judaism, pilgrimage studies, gender, and decolonizing/aware-settler biblical studies. Matthew has walked thousands of kilometres on pilgrimage trails in Europe and North America. His podcast about them is called "Pilgrimage Stories from Up and Down the Staircase," and his (free to stream) documentaries about them are called "Under The North Star" and "Something Grand". Matthew writes academic books for a popular audience as well as literary non-fiction. He also writes fiction and has published many short stories, but no-one has yet accepted his first novel, a mystery set in Quebec.