Mary Daly Helped Wake Me Up
This is a good article on Religion Dispatches on Mary Daly. Her books were required reading during my undergraduate years as a religion major at TCU. A peer and friend in ministry noted that she “held up a mirror for me and then smashed it over my patriarchal head.” Daly did the same for me. This article notes some of her work, and strikes a personal tone that Daly’s work and thought conjured in people.
Beyond Radical: Mary Daly, Feminist Theologian, Changed Worlds
By Susan Henking | January 6, 2010Denied tenure (eventually overturned) and promotion to full professor, and forced into retirement, the longtime Boston College professor’s career spanned world transformations of Roman Catholicism, higher education, and American culture’s treatment of women. Beginning with her degrees from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where she was the first woman to receive a theological degree, through her witnessing of the debate of Vatican II, her authorship of transformational philosophical reflection, her “Exodus” of the Harvard chapel (and of Catholicism) in the name of women, and her involvement in the formation of key areas of scholarly inquiry (including the Women and Religion section of the American Academy of Religion), Mary Daly was an agent of change. Self-identified as a revolutionary and a radical, branded a conservative essentialist or racist by others, her works of philosophical, theological, and genre-bending scholarship affected generations of women.
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