Mary Daly, pioneering feminist who tussled with BC, dies at 81 - Local News Updates - The Boston Globe

Boston Globe article on Mary Daly's death. I am so incredibly grateful to Daly for her pioneering work. And while I, being a thinking adult, both agree and disagree with her, I will not dilute my statement of gratitude to her with apologies or disclaimers for her positions. - sm

Mary Daly, pioneering feminist who tussled with BC, dies at 81 - Local News Updates - The Boston Globe:

Sister Joan Chittister, a feminist author and a member of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pa., said Dr. Daly 'literally turned the standard theological concepts upside down. Mary played with language in such a way that you simply had to stop and think. ... You couldn't use old words in the old ways.'

Coining words with an Irish wit that could slip from sly to savage, Dr. Daly dismissed college officials as "bore-ocrats" who suffered from "academentia" and "predictably reacted with 'misterical' behavior" -- all in a 1996 autobiographical article for The New Yorker magazine. But beyond her choices to capitalize certain words and remold others like clay, she was deeply serious about language and the way it shapes a sense of self.

"Eer since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin," she wrote in the opening of "Sin Big," her New Yorker piece. "The word 'sin' is derived from the Indo-European root 'es-,' meaning 'to be.' When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, 'to be' in the fullest sense is 'to sin.' "