Davison's Doodle

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, 2010

Denied 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.

Click here to read the entire article.

Beginning to think about 2010

I’m not big on resolutions for the New Year, but this article I read on TruthOut by Jim Hightower has me thinking about resolutions and our government leaders.  Here is a paragraph as an example:

Jim Hightower| Hoping for a New Ethic in 2010
27 December 2009 | Truthout.org

Let’s start, then, with those proud-and-loud members of Congress who’ve adamantly opposed real health insurance reform for workaday Americans. Not only do I include the entire block of Republican lawmakers whose vocabulary is limited to the word “no,” but also those pathetic Democrats who’ve compromised the reform idea into corporate mush. It would be neat (and only fair) for each of these stalwarts of the status quo to make this vow for 2010: “Since I helped kill reform, I will give up the excellent government-paid, socialized health coverage that I get so that I am in the same leaky boat as my constituents.”

Is our system so dysfunctional that it can no longer be self correcting?  Isn’t that what electing Obama was all about?