Michael J. Sheeran

Who is Michael J. Sheeran?

Michael J. Sheeran is a Jesuit priest, president of Regis University in Denver, Colorado, and author of the book Beyond Majority Rule: Voteless Decisions in the Society of Friends.

Sheeran was born in New York City in 1940, and entered the Society of Jesus at Florissant, Missouri, in 1957. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1970.

In 1968, Sheeran became interested in the Religious Society of Friends while studying religious communities which practice "communal discernment", a decision-making process which the Jesuit order also utilized when it was founded in 1540, but lost within a few generations.

During his doctoral work in the politics department at Princeton University, Sheeran spent two years conducting interviews, reading, and observing the communal discernment tradition, as exemplified in the voteless decisions of Quakers in their Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. This resulted in his book Beyond Majority Rule, which was published in 1983.

Sheeran received his doctorate in politics from Princeton in 1977.