I’ll blame it on grading papers for days as this is not breaking news. Daly was a force to be reckoned with.
I did hear her speak once. When I was at the Claremont Graduate School she gave a lecture. I have to admit that I didn’t understand what she was railing about. I remember that she just seemed “angry”. She used lots of post-modern-y words that were well beyond my Thomistic-Aristotelian mindset and vocabulary.
The place was packed, though. At least 500 or 600 hundred people. Maybe more. Some people were quite upset with what she was saying; others cheered her on. She seemed angry, yes, but also unfazed and completely at ease with herself. When? This must have been around 1993 or 1994.
Blogger Julian Real has a very thoughtful remembrance of Daly on her site, A Radical Profeminist. And another from the glbtq Encyclopedia. The NY Times obit is here which begins:
Radical feminist Mary Daly, the iconoclastic theologian who proclaimed, ”I hate the Bible,” and retired from Boston College rather than allow men to take her classes, has died. She was 81.
Here’s a photo of Daly on the Boston University website’s “Gallery of religious thinkers and figures“. Quite an astounding assembly!