Congratulations to Jenny Matheny

Jenny Matheny

The Department of Religious Studies is delighted to announce that Jennifer Matheny has completed her PhD, titled ‘Judges 19–21 and Ruth: Canon as a voice of answerability’.

The thesis investigates the possibility of potential canonical voices of answerability (responsibility) for the voiceless women of Judges 19–21. Bakhtin’s dialogism became the heuristic in which to pursue this investigation.

Taking these dialogical concepts into account provides a way to listen to the intertextual voices and how they interplay and shape one another, offering intentional intertextual voices from the margins to speak into the silent gaps within the narrative of Judges 19-21. Bakhtin’s use in Biblical Studies has influenced this project in three main areas:

  1. the polyphonic nature of canon
  2. the quest for marginalized voices, and
  3. genre considerations of Judges 19–21 and the book of Ruth.

This study, thinking alongside Brevard Childs’, takes a canonical approach to the texts in polyphonic dialogue.

Through interdisciplinary methods, using key concepts from Bakhtin and a canonical approach, this research provides a comparative case study of how Judges 19-21 and Ruth are in dialogue. The outcome of this research has illustrated that there are canonical intertextual voices for the voiceless women in Judges 19–21.

Congratulations to Jennifer on this achievement.

Find out more about our PhD in Religious Studies

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