Description
About the book
Emeritus Professor Elaine Mary Wainwright rsm, August 1948 – July 2024 ‘It was with great sadness and deep appreciation that many hundreds of people, in person and online, remembered and farewelled internationally renowned biblical scholar Emeritus Professor (Sr) Elaine Mary Wainwright rsm on Friday 12 July 2024 at Holy Trinity Church in Banyo, Queensland. Based in Oceania, Elaine was widely known for her excellence in scholarly research and teaching, and her wonderful generosity as a colleague, teacher, mentor and friend to many, especially in Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Pasifika. Principally a Matthean scholar, her work focused on feminist, ecological and post-colonial approaches as they informed and shaped the socio-rhetorical methodology she favoured.
The concept of habitat which became a keynote of and interpretive key in her later work had roots in her early life. Elaine was born and brought up near Toowoomba, Queensland, where her parents Tom and Kath ran a dairy farm ‘Ivanhoe’. She felt that her early days on the farm brought her close to the earth, and this relationship with land, and later sea, resonated in her scholarship. Educated in a Roman Catholic tradition, Elaine trained as a commercial teacher and taught at a state high school prior to joining the Sisters of Mercy in Brisbane in 1968. After starting work in 1975 with young women interested in joining the Sisters, she became keenly interested in studies in religion and theology. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours from the University of Queensland in 1980, gained a Master of Arts in Theology at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, in 1985, an Élève Diplômé from the École Biblique de Jérusalem in 1986 and BSS at Pontifical Biblical Commission, Rome, also in 1986. In 1990 she completed her Doctorate through the University of Queensland. The doctorate was subsequently published as Towards a Feminist Critical Reading of the Gospel of Matthew (de Gruyter,1991).’ Taken from the Obituary written for the Society of Biblical Literature.
This volume of essays, brings together speeches that were made at the launch of the Valiant Woman: Words of Wisdom for the Sake of Transformative Action by Elaine Wainwright (ATF Press, 2025), in Brisbane in early 2026, and other papers either given at the SBL session in her honour at the Boston SBL meeting in November 2025, or were written especially for this publication. The title of the volume comes in part from the title of the session at SBL (Habitats of Justice, Ecological Hermeneutics and Elaine Wainright’, or from some of the papers that are published here.
About the editor
Hilary D Regan has been the Publisher of ATF Press Publishing Group for over 30 years and is editor of various of the ATF Press journals and books. He has a background in Systematic Theology.
