Description
Publication in 1968 of The Church and the Second Sex turned Mary Daly into a leading – arguably the first – Catholic feminist theologian. She then, in 1972, preached an incendiary sermon at Harvard Memorial Church, 'left behind centuries of darkness,' as she put it, and walked out of patriarchal religion. Daly next established herself, with Beyond God the Father (1973), as a post-Christian feminist philosopher. In between these trailblazing writings, she began to draft another book entitled Catholicism: End or Beginning? In the moment that she abandoned the text, she also seemingly renounced the institutional Roman Catholic Church. This volume comprises that lost, unfinished manuscript – remarkably rediscovered – augmented by complementary chapters from six preeminent feminist writers. Though partial, it completes the corpus of an iconic figure in radical liberationist and Catholic thought, delving deep into the mind of a woman who dared to leap into uncharted territories of faith and philosophical imagination.
Table of Contents
Introduction Meg Stapleton Smith; Part I. Catholicism: End or Beginning? Mary Daly; Part II. Engagements and Reflections: 1. The Many Minds of Mary Daly Mary E. Hunt; 2. Reformist Catholicism: The Road Not Taken for Mary Daly Lisa Sowle Cahill; 3. Feminist Intrigues at the Limits of Schizoid Theology Siobhán Garrigan; 4. Abstraction, Mysticism, and Revolution: From Catholicism: End or Beginning? to Beyond God the Father and Pure Lust Jennifer Rycenga; 5. Catholicism: End or Beginning? An Open-ended Journey Toward a Theology of Difference Zahra Moballegh; 6. A More Dalyan Christianity Xochitl Alvizo.
