Mathew Guest
Biographic Data
| ID | 349385 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mathew Guest |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mathew |
| FAMILY NAME | Guest |
| SIGNATURE | GUEST M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3184-6821 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Comparisons Across Higher Education Contexts
Understanding campus climates for interfaith learning in higher education supports universities in achieving their missions of producing global leaders and ensuring equitable access and experiences of campus life for students of diverse religious and nonreligious worldviews. The Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS) was a mixed-method study designed to explore these issues in the United States; recently, UK r…
How Does Higher Education Influence Attitudes Towards Muslims? Examining Mechanisms That Reduce Prejudice Within UK Universities
This article examines the relationship between encounters with religious diversity and the perspectives people form about Muslims. Its empirical focus is individuals studying at UK universities. Previous research suggests Muslims are amongst those most subject to negative prejudice in the UK, this being structured around racial or ethnic prejudice and negative judgements about Islam as a religion. Universities, on the other hand, generally retain…
How can universities support students’ interfaith learning? Findings from a longitudinal survey of students in the UK
Across the globe, on-campus religious diversity generates opportunities for learning and growth. But how can universities prepare students to learn about and engage positively with people with different religions and beliefs from their own? Put another way, how can universities best support students’ interfaith learning? This article explores how the university environment, or ‘campus climate’, influences one measure of interfaith learning, stude…
Multi-faith in policy only? Religion and belief inequalities at UK universities since the Equality Act
The Equality Act 2010 requires universities to eliminate harassment, ensure equality of opportunity and promote good relations for those of different religious or philosophical beliefs. The attention universities give to these obligations varies. This article analyses survey data from 4,618 students to examine religion and belief-related experiences and inequalities in universities in relation to the Equality Act’s three foci: eliminating harassm…
What the Solitaire illusion tells us about perception of numerosity
In four experiments we investigated the Solitaire illusion. In this illusion, most observers see as more numerous a set of dots that forms a single central group, compared to dots on the outside of that group. We confirmed and extended the effect to configurations with much higher numerosity than the original and of various colours. Contrary to prediction, separating the two groups, so that they are presented side by side, reduced but did not abo…
Neoliberal Religion
Mathew Guest explores neo-liberalism as an account of contemporary western society and considers what this means for our understanding of religion. The rise of free market economics in western culture is associated with the celebration of competition and prioritization of consumer choices as cultural phenomena that profoundly influence human experience in all areas of life. However, several global political changes – including the election of Don…
Recovering the Commons , a Decade Later
This research note promotes a dialogue among disciplines about education, activism, and research in Appalachian studies. The challenges developing in our current era are occurring amidst significant changes in Appalachian studies as the field’s long-standing leaders and scholars continue to retire. In their places, new scholars are developing who, in many cases, lack the activist training and experiences of their predecessors, but whose academic …
Covid-19 and the Chinese Christian Community in Britain
This article draws on interview data with Chinese Christian leaders to explore how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the Chinese Christian church in Britain. Based upon twelve semi-structured interviews conducted with Christian leaders in nine cities, the research identifies the ways in which the COVID-19 outbreak is shaping the dynamics of intragroup and intergroup connectedness within and beyond the Chinese church in Britain. It finds that …
Tracing the routes to pro-Trump Evangelicalism
As many look back to the US presidential elections in 2020 with a mixture of relief at the outcome and exasperation at Donald Trump's refusal to concede defeat, others are still incredulous that he won first time around.Did that really happen?In so many ways Trump defied expectations and, just as he remains iconoclastic in his approach to statecraft, his path to power revealed
Gone Dollywood
Christian University Students' Attitudes to Gender
This article explores how religion shapes approaches to gender amongst university students in the United Kingdom, focusing on how attitudes about gender interact with their Christian identities. Drawing from 68 semi-structured interviews conducted at five universities, the article identifies three main approaches Christian students adopt when asked how faith affects their views on gender: the individualized approach, the egalitarian approach and …
Glyn J. Ackerley, Importing Faith
Congregational Studies in the UK
Introduction
Students' Constructions of a Christian Future
Economic uncertainties have unsettled the status of higher education as an assured means to social mobility, raising questions of how students orient themselves to life after graduation. In this context, how does religion (a neglected aspect of student identity) shape students' attitudes and plans? This article examines the future aspirations of Christian students, theorising Christian identity as an inter-subjective resource through which 'alter…
The Emerging Church in Transatlantic Perspective
Is the Emerging Church movement (ECM) a single transnational movement? Or is it a series of parallel religious orientations framed by nationally specific contexts? Cross-national comparisons of the many manifestations of the ECM remain scarce, especially as the development of the ECM across the globe (e.g., in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand) is most certainly affected by divergent histories and socioreligious la…
Death, Life and Laughter
In 2010 lampposts topped by surveillance cameras appeared in parts of Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city. Unannounced, strategically placed at traffic intersections and along main roads, the cameras initially caused bemusement. The camera system, codenamed ‘Project Champion’, comprised over 200 devices explicitly targeted around two areas of mainly Muslim residence. The objective of the scheme was to ‘Create a vehicle movement “net” around…
The Deconstructed Church
Challenging ‘Belief’ and the Evangelical Bias
Popular and academic accounts of university-based religion tend to privilege evangelical Christianity, presented as a morally conservative, conversionist movement at odds with university contexts, which are widely assumed to be vehicles for a progressive Western modernity. This is especially the case in the UK, given the association of higher education with secularisation, yet virtually no research has studied this interface by examining the live…
Navigating religion between university and home
Drawing on qualitative interview research conducted with undergraduates at English universities, this paper examines Christian students' experiences of living out their religious identities at university. Noting the transitional nature of the higher education experience, which often destabilizes existing identities, we explore how, for students self-identifying as 'Christian', the enactment of faith helps to form experiences of continuity between…
The Reproduction and Transmission of Religion
This article critiques theories of transmission and the reproduction of religion from Comte through Marx and Durkheim to contemporary sociologists of religion, including Berger, engaging as it does so with positivist and sociology-of-knowledge approaches to the question, among others. It also deals with the issues of transmission and reproduction in the context of secularisation theory in its various guises. The article further considers Hervieu-…
The Reproduction and Transmission of Religion
This article critiques theories of transmission and the reproduction of religion from Comte through Marx and Durkheim to contemporary sociologists of religion, including Berger, engaging as it does so with positivist and sociology-of-knowledge approaches to the question, among others. It also deals with the issues of transmission and reproduction in the context of secularisation theory in its various guises. The article further considers Hervieu-…
The post-evangelical emerging church
This article explores new religious groups who build a distinctive vision of the ‘emerging church’ by drawing from a post-evangelical perspective. Specifically, we explore the ways in which two groups (a Baptist church in Auckland, New Zealand, and a group attached to a Church of England parish in York, UK) re-imagine church and reflexively reconfigure ideas of Christian religion, in light of their embrace of a ‘post-modern’ view of the world. Th…
Congregational studies in the UK
The editors of this volume have assembled the material contained within it in an attempt to recover the main lines of development of the history of congregational studies in the UK, to showcase some of the most interesting recent work in this sphere, and to take stock of congregational studies as a whole
Navigating religion between university and home
Drawing on qualitative interview research conducted with undergraduates at English universities, this paper examines Christian students' experiences of living out their religious identities at university. Noting the transitional nature of the higher education experience, which often destabilizes existing identities, we explore how, for students self-identifying as 'Christian', the enactment of faith helps to form experiences of continuity between…
Challenging ‘Belief’ and the Evangelical Bias
Popular and academic accounts of university-based religion tend to privilege evangelical Christianity, presented as a morally conservative, conversionist movement at odds with university contexts, which are widely assumed to be vehicles for a progressive Western modernity. This is especially the case in the UK, given the association of higher education with secularisation, yet virtually no research has studied this interface by examining the live…
Students' Constructions of a Christian Future
Economic uncertainties have unsettled the status of higher education as an assured means to social mobility, raising questions of how students orient themselves to life after graduation. In this context, how does religion (a neglected aspect of student identity) shape students' attitudes and plans? This article examines the future aspirations of Christian students, theorising Christian identity as an inter-subjective resource through which 'alter…
The Deconstructed Church
Multi-faith in policy only? Religion and belief inequalities at UK universities since the Equality Act
The Equality Act 2010 requires universities to eliminate harassment, ensure equality of opportunity and promote good relations for those of different religious or philosophical beliefs. The attention universities give to these obligations varies. This article analyses survey data from 4,618 students to examine religion and belief-related experiences and inequalities in universities in relation to the Equality Act’s three foci: eliminating harassm…
Covid-19 and the Chinese Christian Community in Britain
This article draws on interview data with Chinese Christian leaders to explore how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the Chinese Christian church in Britain. Based upon twelve semi-structured interviews conducted with Christian leaders in nine cities, the research identifies the ways in which the COVID-19 outbreak is shaping the dynamics of intragroup and intergroup connectedness within and beyond the Chinese church in Britain. It finds that …
The Emerging Church in Transatlantic Perspective
Is the Emerging Church movement (ECM) a single transnational movement? Or is it a series of parallel religious orientations framed by nationally specific contexts? Cross-national comparisons of the many manifestations of the ECM remain scarce, especially as the development of the ECM across the globe (e.g., in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand) is most certainly affected by divergent histories and socioreligious la…
Congregational studies in the UK
The editors of this volume have assembled the material contained within it in an attempt to recover the main lines of development of the history of congregational studies in the UK, to showcase some of the most interesting recent work in this sphere, and to take stock of congregational studies as a whole
The post-evangelical emerging church
This article explores new religious groups who build a distinctive vision of the ‘emerging church’ by drawing from a post-evangelical perspective. Specifically, we explore the ways in which two groups (a Baptist church in Auckland, New Zealand, and a group attached to a Church of England parish in York, UK) re-imagine church and reflexively reconfigure ideas of Christian religion, in light of their embrace of a ‘post-modern’ view of the world. Th…
The Reproduction and Transmission of Religion
This article critiques theories of transmission and the reproduction of religion from Comte through Marx and Durkheim to contemporary sociologists of religion, including Berger, engaging as it does so with positivist and sociology-of-knowledge approaches to the question, among others. It also deals with the issues of transmission and reproduction in the context of secularisation theory in its various guises. The article further considers Hervieu-…
The Reproduction and Transmission of Religion
This article critiques theories of transmission and the reproduction of religion from Comte through Marx and Durkheim to contemporary sociologists of religion, including Berger, engaging as it does so with positivist and sociology-of-knowledge approaches to the question, among others. It also deals with the issues of transmission and reproduction in the context of secularisation theory in its various guises. The article further considers Hervieu-…
Navigating religion between university and home
Drawing on qualitative interview research conducted with undergraduates at English universities, this paper examines Christian students' experiences of living out their religious identities at university. Noting the transitional nature of the higher education experience, which often destabilizes existing identities, we explore how, for students self-identifying as 'Christian', the enactment of faith helps to form experiences of continuity between…
Challenging ‘Belief’ and the Evangelical Bias
Popular and academic accounts of university-based religion tend to privilege evangelical Christianity, presented as a morally conservative, conversionist movement at odds with university contexts, which are widely assumed to be vehicles for a progressive Western modernity. This is especially the case in the UK, given the association of higher education with secularisation, yet virtually no research has studied this interface by examining the live…
The Deconstructed Church
Death, Life and Laughter
In 2010 lampposts topped by surveillance cameras appeared in parts of Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city. Unannounced, strategically placed at traffic intersections and along main roads, the cameras initially caused bemusement. The camera system, codenamed ‘Project Champion’, comprised over 200 devices explicitly targeted around two areas of mainly Muslim residence. The objective of the scheme was to ‘Create a vehicle movement “net” around…
Congregational Studies in the UK
Introduction
Students' Constructions of a Christian Future
Economic uncertainties have unsettled the status of higher education as an assured means to social mobility, raising questions of how students orient themselves to life after graduation. In this context, how does religion (a neglected aspect of student identity) shape students' attitudes and plans? This article examines the future aspirations of Christian students, theorising Christian identity as an inter-subjective resource through which 'alter…
The Emerging Church in Transatlantic Perspective
Is the Emerging Church movement (ECM) a single transnational movement? Or is it a series of parallel religious orientations framed by nationally specific contexts? Cross-national comparisons of the many manifestations of the ECM remain scarce, especially as the development of the ECM across the globe (e.g., in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand) is most certainly affected by divergent histories and socioreligious la…
Glyn J. Ackerley, Importing Faith
Gone Dollywood
Christian University Students' Attitudes to Gender
This article explores how religion shapes approaches to gender amongst university students in the United Kingdom, focusing on how attitudes about gender interact with their Christian identities. Drawing from 68 semi-structured interviews conducted at five universities, the article identifies three main approaches Christian students adopt when asked how faith affects their views on gender: the individualized approach, the egalitarian approach and …
Recovering the Commons , a Decade Later
This research note promotes a dialogue among disciplines about education, activism, and research in Appalachian studies. The challenges developing in our current era are occurring amidst significant changes in Appalachian studies as the field’s long-standing leaders and scholars continue to retire. In their places, new scholars are developing who, in many cases, lack the activist training and experiences of their predecessors, but whose academic …
Covid-19 and the Chinese Christian Community in Britain
This article draws on interview data with Chinese Christian leaders to explore how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the Chinese Christian church in Britain. Based upon twelve semi-structured interviews conducted with Christian leaders in nine cities, the research identifies the ways in which the COVID-19 outbreak is shaping the dynamics of intragroup and intergroup connectedness within and beyond the Chinese church in Britain. It finds that …
Tracing the routes to pro-Trump Evangelicalism
As many look back to the US presidential elections in 2020 with a mixture of relief at the outcome and exasperation at Donald Trump's refusal to concede defeat, others are still incredulous that he won first time around.Did that really happen?In so many ways Trump defied expectations and, just as he remains iconoclastic in his approach to statecraft, his path to power revealed
Neoliberal Religion
Mathew Guest explores neo-liberalism as an account of contemporary western society and considers what this means for our understanding of religion. The rise of free market economics in western culture is associated with the celebration of competition and prioritization of consumer choices as cultural phenomena that profoundly influence human experience in all areas of life. However, several global political changes – including the election of Don…
What the Solitaire illusion tells us about perception of numerosity
In four experiments we investigated the Solitaire illusion. In this illusion, most observers see as more numerous a set of dots that forms a single central group, compared to dots on the outside of that group. We confirmed and extended the effect to configurations with much higher numerosity than the original and of various colours. Contrary to prediction, separating the two groups, so that they are presented side by side, reduced but did not abo…
How can universities support students’ interfaith learning? Findings from a longitudinal survey of students in the UK
Across the globe, on-campus religious diversity generates opportunities for learning and growth. But how can universities prepare students to learn about and engage positively with people with different religions and beliefs from their own? Put another way, how can universities best support students’ interfaith learning? This article explores how the university environment, or ‘campus climate’, influences one measure of interfaith learning, stude…
Multi-faith in policy only? Religion and belief inequalities at UK universities since the Equality Act
The Equality Act 2010 requires universities to eliminate harassment, ensure equality of opportunity and promote good relations for those of different religious or philosophical beliefs. The attention universities give to these obligations varies. This article analyses survey data from 4,618 students to examine religion and belief-related experiences and inequalities in universities in relation to the Equality Act’s three foci: eliminating harassm…
Comparisons Across Higher Education Contexts
Understanding campus climates for interfaith learning in higher education supports universities in achieving their missions of producing global leaders and ensuring equitable access and experiences of campus life for students of diverse religious and nonreligious worldviews. The Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS) was a mixed-method study designed to explore these issues in the United States; recently, UK r…
How Does Higher Education Influence Attitudes Towards Muslims? Examining Mechanisms That Reduce Prejudice Within UK Universities
This article examines the relationship between encounters with religious diversity and the perspectives people form about Muslims. Its empirical focus is individuals studying at UK universities. Previous research suggests Muslims are amongst those most subject to negative prejudice in the UK, this being structured around racial or ethnic prejudice and negative judgements about Islam as a religion. Universities, on the other hand, generally retain…
Sociology (15 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (13 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Religious studies (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Higher education (7 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (7 works)