Editor AWR: Matthew Anderson was ordained in 2005 as priest in the Anglican Church in the USA, taught at the School of Alexandria and served the Anglican/Episcopal Diocese of Egypt between 2009 and 2011. Upon return to the USA he continued with a PhD study on blasphemy in Islam at Georgetown University which he obtained in May 2018. The Center for Arab-West Understanding invited Matthew Anderson to participate in the Intercultural Summer School of the Center for Arab-West Understanding and Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development, June 26 – July 7, 2018, and to spend some time in our office in view of succeeding Cornelis Hulsman in the coming years. Matthew Anderson’s ambitions are academic, but since he had previously served as a pastor, Richard Kaiser, Warden of St. John the Baptist Church in Maadi, Cairo, asked him to preach on August 10, 2018.
With his background as a pastor and a scholar he follows the line of other great scholars on Muslim-Christian relations such as Prof. Dr. Otto Meinardus and Prof. Dr. Wolfram Reiss.
More conservative Christians would focus on Jesus being the bread of life but Matthew Anderson, instead, focused on something most human beings can identify with; “inner spiritual, personal, and existential needs that are for many of us just as much of a driving force in our lives as our physical needs.” And if that is the case then claims of Jesus in John 6 are intriguing.
