Dr Matt Williams is a theologian and farm-based educator.
After a period of teaching in Ekwendeni, Malawi, he completed his thesis on Socio-Economic Ethics in the Gospel of John with Prof. John Barclay at Durham (2021). Since then, he has taught social enterprise and biblical studies as well as undertaking several research and social action projects within the academy and the third sector. His main interests, in which he has also published, involve taking an interdisciplinary biblical approach to community farming, agrarianism and its policy implications, trinitarian ontology and farm-based education. He lives in Whitehead, Co. Antrim with his family and does his farm-based work at Jubilee Farm, near Larne.
While a visiting researcher at the University of 91直播, Dr Williams will undertake a research project examining an agrarian conception of 鈥渉ome鈥, reading the biblical text against characteristically Western biases that have obscured this element. People are increasingly disconnected from their sources of food and their local environment, perpetuating a colonial dynamic regarding natural and human resources. Focusing on certain biblical texts can help to make a connection between where people (and other creatures) dwell and where land is cultivated, shaping a more integral understanding of home. This interpretative process is enriched by textual engagement alongside those for whom an agrarian mode of life is normative, namely by conducting contextual Bible studies with the chiTumbuka speaking people of Northern Malawi.