I was a tenderfoot in feminist discourse when I started my research on patriarchy, feminism, and Mary Daly. In my thesis, one aspect I engaged was Daly's battle with gender issues in Christian theology. From the beginning I was troubled by Mary Daly's views on God, men, and women in her discourse on Christianity. Daly undoubtedly contributed to the discussion on gender issues in the Christian faith, but her focus on androcentrism and her interpretations of Scripture led her to abandon the Christian faith. Mary Daly has written extensively on patriarchy as it is found in religion – particularly in the Christian faith – and how it filters through society. In her critique of patriarchy she set her course to dismantle the facade of a patriarchal and misogynistic God as the root of patriarchy. Daly did not see any positive qualities of the Christian faith and completely rejected other interpretations of a God whose person embraces both male and female qualities. Against this background I will evaluate Daly's post-Christian feminist theological and philosophical paradigm. I propose that Daly has a quadripartite theological and philosophical paradigm wherein there are four main players. The ‘Who is who’ in Daly's quadripartite patriarchal theological and philosophical paradigm are the patriarchal male, the patriarchal female, the patriarchal God and the biophilic woman.
Durham, a psychologist, in her doctoral discourse of Daly's patriarchal religion, makes an attention-grabbing observation about Daly's having a tripartite psychological paradigm. Durham (
The patriarchal males referred to by Daly are religious clerical males (representing the church), and males in other social professions she encountered. Daly applied her thoughts on the patriarchal male throughout her books and it is clearly fiercely anti-male. Daly (
… that males and males only are the originators, planners, controllers, and legitimators of patriarchy. Patriarchy is the homeland of males; it is Father Land; and men are its agents…. we live in a profoundly anti-female society, a misogynistic ‘civilization’ in which men collectively victimize women, attacking us as personifications of their own paranoid fears, as The Enemy. Within this society it is men who rape, who sap women's energy, who deny women economic and political powers. (pp. 28–29)
To Daly the Christian tradition of God as Father, and the maleness of God and Christ legitimise and reinforce male power in society – something she believed women could and should not identify with. Daly argued that patriarchy, with its misogynistic agenda, uses theology, metaphysics and language to victimise women in every sphere of their lives.
Daly's hermeneutical approach lay in her belief that men used their imagination to construct God as male, and in so doing provided themselves with the basis of patriarchy and the consequential oppression of women (Bickley
Daly presents all males as patriarchs and as the vehicle for the church's patriarchal teachings on the nature of women and the nature of God. Daly claims that women are kept in place by church symbols imbedded in the church's masochistic response to women with its eternal feminine-divine plan but that women are to remain submissive, meek, and obedient (Daly
Misogynist churchmen such as Jerome, Augustine, Clement of Alexandria, Bonaventure, and Aquinas, to name a few, perpetuated the views of women as sinful and inferior and thus contributed to women's masochism (Daly
There is no question that Daly hated men. In an interview with Bridle (
As I wrote in
In the same interview, Daly made it clear that she did not think about men and when pushed to answer a question about the differences between women and men Daly (in Bridle
You know, I don't mean to be unpleasant, but we're coming from different worlds. I was trained in that world of thinking, a certain christian or Western philosophical way, but I don't want to be drawn into talking that way because I don't relate to it and it irritates me. (p. 33)
In addition, when asked whether her idea of an idyllic prehistoric culture could be interpreted as romanticisation, Daly (in Bridle
… we live in hell. This is called hell. H-E-L-L – patriarchy…. I think the question comes from not looking deeply enough at the horror of phallocracy, penocracy, jockocracy, cococracy, call it whatever – patriarchy. (p. 22)
Daly's perceived mental, spiritual, and physical horror which women experience is an unbearable situation for her, and therefore she believed that women need a new kind of dream – the dream of escaping from the patriarchal male. Daly also emphasised her belief that in order for women, and other forms of life, to survive, the earth needs to be decontaminated; her solution to this was a drastic reduction of the male population.
In
Daly blamed men for not recognising that their misogynistic and evil patriarchal religion that they portrayed as the will of God had actually harmed women so deeply. In her journey of be-ing, Daly also started to distance herself from those women who did not share her radical women's liberation vision. The following portray her views on the patriarchal female.
Throughout Daly's works, it is clear that she favoured women, but one is surprised when Daly showed some bias against certain women, especially those who did not share her radical women's liberation vision. In
… as the extent of the risk of radical feminism becomes more evident, it becomes clear that there are women, including some who would describe themselves as ‘feminists’, with whom I do not feel enough identification to warrant the pronoun we. (p. 25)
Daly believed that her use of the label ‘anti-male’ has intimidated certain women who then felt a false need to make distinctions such as ‘I am anti-patriarchal but not anti-male’ (Daly
The patriarchal woman is forced to project self-hatred onto herself and she becomes the victim of herself and other women. In their silence, patriarchal women live through men and against those women who feel the need to be free from patriarchal oppression. Daly blames the ‘demonic power structures which induce women to internalize false identities’ (Daly
Patriarchal women work towards their own self-destruction, turning women against themselves and their sisters and ultimately suffocating themselves in the process. Daly states that a patriarchal woman ‘sides with her invaders and her possessors’ and her ‘false selves possesses her genuine Self’ (Daly
… turns against her sisters who, themselves invaded and carried into the State of Possession, turn against her Self and against their Selves. The divided ones, the Self-Selves, shelve or sell their Selves. They become ever-hardening shells of their Selves, suffocation their own process. They become iron masks, choking their own becoming, hiding their own know-ing, substituting deception for now-ing. (Daly
The patriarchal woman is timid and is useful to man – ‘domesticated, harnessed, meek, humble, subdued, cultivated, lacking in spirit, zest, dull, mild and insipid’. These women are ‘dedicated to the cult of male divinity’ (Daly
Daly comments that women without a sense of self-fulfilment cannot live with the emotion of joy. They become depressed and crave romantic love, marriage, and religion. They seek professional help and turn to alcohol, pills and other man-made substances – Daly (
Daly later distanced herself from what she called the patriarchal woman, as they did not share her radical vision of women's liberation. I will now continue to examine Daly's perspective on the patriarchal God.
Daly did not merely challenge the core of Christianity, but also the patriarchal male God. She did not only seek to reinterpret Scripture, but also confronted the very idea of the person of God. Daly saw the image of God the Father, as portrayed in Christian literature, as the embodiment of patriarchy. Daly condemned the patriarchal church for creating the symbol of God the Father in our imagination as a means of oppressing women (Daly
In Daly's works,
Throughout the ages, women only had male role models and one of these is God. Mary Daly wanted to change these concepts.
Daly claims that many people have distorted concepts, images and attitudes towards God, and that the symbols and images used for God grip people's imaginations – something she rejects as primitive and inadequate (Daly
For Daly, God became an inadequate static concept that invites suspicion, and thus she held that God, as Father, ought to die, since she saw this one-sexed symbol of God as problematic and sexist.
Daly holds God responsible for generating god-males and God's divine plan, which, she believes, created sexual stereotyping, and a sense of poor self-worth among women (Daly
Daly also reminds us that God as a patriarchal Father works to sustain the privileged status of his sons on earth (Daly
Daly accuses the Trinity of being totally in unity through their mutual love as expressed by the procession of the third person named the Holy Spirit (Daly
And then there is Daly's fourth paradigm, namely that of the bioiphilic woman as ultimate be-ing.
Daly's concept of the biophilic woman changed over time as her attitude on patriarchy grows more intense. At first, Daly believes that it is possible for women to gain freedom from patriarchal stereotyping by confronting patriarchy through dialogue between men and women (Daly
As Daly's concept of the biophilic women grows more radical, she begins to define it as the liberator for women, a way for them to abandon patriarchal self-alienation (Daly 1979:23).
In order for Daly's biophilic women to participate in Be-ing, she believes that they will have to understand that self-transcendence will enable them to acknowledge that ‘all presently envisioned goals, life-styles, symbols, and social structures may be transitory and that they will be free from idolatry, or absolutising, even to their own individual causes (Daly
Biophilic women have to challenge the very misogynist religious teachings, such as the fall, and must reject patriarchal oppression. She warns that the patriarchal oppressors will try to undermine women (Daly
Biophilic women must also ask non-questions about non-data, by replacing the grandiose selves of patriarchal males with ‘Ludic cerebration thinking out of experience’, in order to unlock ‘intricacies and ambivalences of the human situation’ (Daly
However, central to Daly's demand of biophilic women is that they must be aware of patriarchy in all of its manifestations in order to avoid self-sacrificing themselves for the salvation of men (Daly
Daly explaines that biophilic women are spooking, sparking, and spinning. Through spooking, biophilic women defend themselves against patriarchy in their journey towards wholeness (Daly
Daly's biophilic women have to realise that they are the source of their ‘own Self-esteem, with high expectations of themselves’, who live apart from the sado-society. In their world, they reverse patriarchy and ensure that they never commit violence against other women who may block their creativity (Daly
In order for women to analyse and evaluate their conversion from patriarchy to biophilic health, women have to sense their difference from the patriarchal norm; they will pay a price for their difference; they will have to be women-identified-women and they will have to remain radical feminists. Being radical feminists, they have to be able to see through, exorcise, and renounce the ‘patriarchal god to avoid sliding back into the Sadostate’ (Daly
In what follows, I will evaluate Daly's quadripartite theological and philosophical paradigms. It will become evident that Daly's postulations do not take women anywhere meaningful in their struggle against patriarchal oppression, at least not Christian women, but that she has contributed to the further marginalisation of women in her views on God, men, and women.
Daly has undoubtedly drawn our attention to many crucial problems that women have encountered within society and indeed within the church.
However, her attack on the Christian God does not solve the humiliation, rejection, subjugations, and pain women suffer under a patriarchal system. Whereas women were the victims of male oppression, Daly's solution to this is to remake God as the villain. Daly's total dismay and discontent with how males treated her sets her on a self-righteous course to rename God. Daly could no longer differentiate between the roles of men and woman and, for her, Christianity became incompatible with feminism.
An analysis of Daly's views on patriarchy does not offer us a working hypothesis regarding women's self-identity in the Image of God. God created women and men for a purpose. Daly inappropriately assigns a singular purpose to the female-form based on women's physical design only. I contend that through Daly's improper assumption that the purpose of women is merely biological, she has functionally reduced them to sexual beings. We find numerous texts in the Bible that deal with the differences between men and women and our different roles. However problematic these texts may be, they do not represent a checklist for stereotyping what each gender should do or not do. Instead, they teach us how to relate to each other in, and through, God.
Daly villainises God and all men and she distances herself from women who did and do not agree with her views. We need to question whether Daly's quadripartite theological and philosophical paradigm has contributed to our understanding of gender issues in Christian theology in any way. In Daly's eyes, Christianity is male; Daly is female, and therefore cannot be a Christian. Her rather narrow views on males, females and God are reminiscent of those held by many of the church fathers about women.
Against this background I will now evaluate her patriarchal male concept.
In her earlier writings, Daly writes highly of feminist men. She also admits that there were men who defended and assisted her both in her professional and personal life. Initially, Daly sees the possibility of a true being and becoming through the healing of conflicts between men and women on a conscious level of the androgynous being and mode of living. The split of feminine and masculine roles for the earlier Daly is a social construct and not a true reflection of individuals (Tyminski
In her later writings, however, Daly's essentialism goes even further and pushes women into occupying a completely different space from men (Knutsen
Daly would have considered the question ‘What about men?’ as absurd because, in her method of thinking, she resists the inclusion of men (Grigg
Although Daly dismisses the labelling of other's views of her as essentialist, Jones contends that she is a biological essentialist because of Daly's postulation ‘that the source of women's revolutionary way of being rests within them’ as part of their embodied distinctiveness (Jones
Daly has reversed the argument against patriarchy by using the same sexist arguments that those who supported patriarchy are accused of using. Daly is simply using a sexist argument which relies on essentialism. She reverses it, but retains the sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and racism implicit in a sadosociety in the first place (Rodkey
By devaluing males, Daly does not provide a solution to the gender dilemma that has faced women for centuries. Unfortunately, what Daly ended up contributing to was a greater division in the gender debate. Ruether (
Mary Daly concentrates on a passionate disclosing of the inhumanity of males and their culture of rape, genocide, and war. The history of women becomes a trail of crucifixions, with males as the evil archons of an anticosmos where women are entrapped. (p. 390)
Daly was naive in her portrayal of women as morally superior beings ‘who intrinsically possess creative values superior to any values articulated by men’ (Andolsen
Daly's ontological conclusions about males and females are depersonalising. They entail the reversal of sex-types and fail to overcome the dichotomy of sex-role stereotyping. By turning men into scapegoats and by ‘castrating’ them she makes another the Other (Fiorenza
In decoding Daly's views on the patriarchal male, we can ask whether Daly was a man-hater, or whether she simply withdrew from the battle of the sexes, leaving men to fend for themselves. This is a question that will always linger in one's mind whenever Daly's name is mentioned. As Daly becomes more radical in her views, she becomes increasingly outspoken against women who did not live up to her standards of what constitutes feminism. In the following section, I will analyse Daly's attitude towards the women she labels
It is clear that Daly has separated and marginalised those women whose different points of view did not support hers through her labelling of them as
At this stage, it is important to point to Daly's utopian, gynocentric lesbian separatism. I concur with Tyminski (
Women, heterosexual or lesbian, whose consciousness have been destroyed, may exercise free speech, but may not describe themselves as feminist and may not speak on behalf of feminists (Daly
Daly's utopian, gynocentric lesbian separatism, which excludes the patriarchal female, rests on shaky ground. Again, her essentialism is clear. Daly's preoccupation in defining female sensibility points to her dangerously erroneous generalisation of women, following the mode of her case against men. The formation of women's self-identity is not only constructed by being aware of patriarchy, but also is innate and socially constructed by different norms and people in the process of forming self-identify. Raymond (
Yet there are differences, [
The only real difference that can change a person's ‘ontological placement on Daly's dichotomous map’ (Alcoff
Daly's theology is, according to her critics, bifurcating and polarising to such an extent that it is not useful in constructive theological and philosophical debates (Friedman
Dale originally criticised language that refers to God in male terminology. Daly later concludes that people's perceptions about God were so grounded in physically, spiritually and culturally patriarchal views that it had become pointless to persist in any argument against God's maleness.
Although I agree with Daly's views on the inadequacy of language, I do not find the way in which she reworked the gender of God and the renaming of Him at all helpful. I concur with Groothuis (
Nowhere in the Bible is God referred to as a sexual being. Rather, especially in Old Testament Law, sexuality is kept meticulously separate from religious worship and other spiritual concerns. Completely absent from biblical religion is any hint of sexuality as a spiritual force, or of masculinity and femininity as spiritual principles in the God-head of the cosmos. Biblical religion stands distinct and apart from the pagan fertility religions in it's strictly nonsexualized concept of spiritual reality and the nature of God. The nations surrounding ancient Israel believed that the fertility deities created and perpetuated human, plant, and animal life through their own divine sexual activity. But Israel did not share in the divinization of sex; it was a phenomenon of the creature, not of the deity. (p. 101)
God cannot merely be dismissed as an androgynous being who was invented by men who sought power in their own masculinity. Neither can the many wrongs bestowed upon women through men identifying with God's maleness be defended.
Daly was chiefly concerned about the language the church uses to describe God. She believed that women would only find themselves when they discovered God as a personal experience of wholeness and meaning, rather than as a static entity. Daly discarded God and expected women to follow suit. Women should not attack the patriarchal God but rather leave him behind. That is exactly what Daly did, and she set herself on a quest to rename God. In order to rename God, Daly believed that women have to reach inward towards the God beyond and beneath the
Daly believed that women could only gain spiritual liberation once masculine terms for God were removed from Scripture and theology. Therefore, Daly advanced her argument for a process theology in the naming of God the Verb; in hearing and naming ourselves out of the depth, women are naming towards God, which is what theology has always been about (Schaab
It is clear both that Daly built her theology around patriarchy in religion and that she launched an assault on a completely male-dominated society. Daly blamed women's problems not only on religious patriarchy, but sought to reform the church's language about God and to revise the idea of God. Daly's feminist ideology, however, is presupposed and overrides the overt teachings of Scripture, so that her positions cannot be said to derive from the actual interpretation of Scripture itself (Köstenberger
Daly wanted to rename God and to develop new ways of interpreting the Bible. In doing so, however, she was quick to inflate what did not fit her theology and political agenda. Patriarchy, she charged, was an omnipresent and insidious social system that sustained itself and squashed dissent (Jenkins
Patriarchy is responsible for the symbol of God as Father and as a mechanism for keeping women in an oppressive state (Daly
desired to mount a challenge to the patriarchal religion of Christianity, a spiritual revolution in which the old order of sexism would be overthrown and a ‘new-being’ would manifest in women. (p. 41)
The misappropriated metaphorical language she used to replace her notion of a patriarchal God is just as ambiguous as her claim that patriarchal metaphorical language is used for God. Within Daly's concept of a patriarchal
Daly's self-appointed task, the renaming and reifying of God, changes her concept of God from that of ‘Supreme Being’ to a ‘state of Be-ing’ and as a ‘Verb’ for women ‘to journey beyond patriarchal fixation’ (Daly
In typical Dalyian fashion, she tells us what God is like, and how she tells us remains questionable because she has distanced herself from the Christian faith. Her metaphors and myths are insufficient to express the complexity of God's nature, regardless of the fact that she believes that she has a better description of religious reality than that which Christianity has to offer women. Daly's metaphors for God are rooted in existentialism and neo-pagan religious philosophy. She uses metaphors to speak to women's religious experience and as a theological tool to shape her own reality and ideas about God and Christianity as man-made myths. Daly redefines negative metaphors used for women, such as
Any epistemologically acceptable theory of religious truth must recognize that beliefs are integral to religion and that truth in religion, just as in other domains, must include the notion of propositional and exclusive truth. (p. 150)
This remark is a valid point when one analyses Daly's language for God. I agree with Bloesch, who questions the purpose of metaphors for God-language. He questions whether the purpose of such God-language is to ‘give a true knowledge or merely a symbolic awareness of the ultimate reality we call God’ (Bloesch
In Daly's attempts at changing metaphors she obscured the fact that human language will always objectify, quantify and limit our understanding. Such feminists arbitrarily rejected propositional god-language in favour of metaphorical language. On what basis did these feminists decide that god-language cannot be both metaphorical and propositional? Human language is limited, but does this necessarily mean that language cannot reveal truth? (Talbert-Wettler
Daly was actually doing what she accused patriarchy of doing. The literal understanding of the maleness of God was, and still is today, abused in patriarchal societies to subordinate women. The views on God being male are, however, not generally accepted today. Daly criticised the literal misuse of the maleness of God through patriarchy, but she remains captive of this literal understanding and cannot escape from it herself. Whereas patriarchy limited God in a metaphor of maleness, she limited God in metaphorical language. As such God becomes a loveless impersonal being, which is a reversal of the biblical message.
Daly's view of sexism as the root of patriarchal evil and her dismissal of others evokes concerns, especially through her creation of the biophilic woman. Daly's biophilic women are wild women living in the transcendent now and are inherently different from both the patriarchal male and the patriarchal female in that they completely reject a patriarchal God. In her view, liberation for women is primarily spiritual; they ‘discover an alternative land within their inner selves’, and in this alternative land ‘they learn to communicate with new language’, breaking from old patriarchal language and transforming theirs into the dominant language (Ruether
These biophilic women live in a healthy background within the bonding of sisterhood, wherein they prioritise women's experience in order to heal and to discover the lost self. Living in this background enables biophilic women to withdraw their energies from patriarchy.
We can argue that for Daly's biophilic women, living in the background is indicative of what she believed it would mean to live in a physical world through imagination. One can also argue that we are all inclined to some extent to live through our imaginations, for it is through our imagination that we can escape the harsh realities we face on a daily basis. Nevertheless, for Daly, the biophilic women living in the background was a reality – a healthy choice and an effective ethical and political choice that excluded men and women who do not form part of her vision. Daly's post-Christian reality is a gradual process. Firstly, she indicates that the church had entered a new era in an article, ‘Dispensing with Trivia’ (
Durham (
The villainized male is the despised self; the Biophilic woman is the idealized self; the Background is the magic circle; the Journey is the escape to the magic circle; the ethical shoulds are the tyranny of the shoulds. The dismissal of the views of others is an aggressive-vindictive strategy for putting conflicts out of action. Citing hatred of women as the sole cause of the problem between the sexes can also be considered a strategy for putting conflicts out of actions through failure to take one's share of the blame. (p. 181)
Daly's ideology of pure biophilic women separates patriarchal women as non-beings and causes unnecessary dichotomy among women (Fiorenza
Daly reversed androgyny to a gynocentric ideal wherein the mutuality between the sexes is destroyed. Daly faults all males, whereas she sees the biophilic woman as a being without fault.
Placing the necrophiliac male outside the epistemologically privileged position of biophilic women is philosophically, historically, and socially indefensible (Davaney
Daly's self-exaltation, self-righteousness and superiority, as well as that of biophilic women, invoked and invited animosity between the sexes, not reconciliation. Daly is guilty of remaking God in the image of the victim – God becomes the champion of Daly's messianic, history-bearing biophilic women and she consigns men to hell, while Daly's biophilic women become the idealised, heroic superwomen (Brayn
In Daly's creating of the biophilic women, and their participating-in-Be-ing, she managed to mould a form of ‘suprasexual existence of self-independence, self-sufficiency, and self-integral unity’ (Tong
To identify with biophilic women's experience as the ultimate experience is not possible because experience can also have some ambiguous and ambivalent qualities that can be passed up as reality. Therefore, Daly's description of biophilic women as infinite movement, as good, true and revelatory is as guilty of idolatry as it is inadequate, because it limits women's (and men's) experience (Stenger
Daly has reimprisoned women conceptually, and according to Hewitt (
Daly's glorification of female attributes and values mobilizes identity thinking within the walls or rigid conceptualizations that foreclose on the mystery of individual being in all its diversity and difference. (p. 199)
Daly merely reversed the patriarchal glorification of the male to the ultimate glorification of the biophilic woman – something that is clearly reserved for a chosen few.
Daly created an exclusive lesbian community in her background that has little to do with real historic women. She became imprisoned by her own gynocentric language which points to her ultimate failure and inability to deal with the real world with its real problems and ultimately with women's struggle against patriarchy.
Daly's vision of her self-created biophilic women is otherworldly, a denial and an escape from the patriarchal world, and a place wherein only a select few are welcome. Daly, with her creation of biophilic women living in the background, turned her back on women's struggle against patriarchy.
The existence of patriarchy has had a major impact on people's self-identity over thousands of years. It is true that society and culture, and the way they function, have conditioned the self-identity of women and men through ‘un/spoken, un/acknowledged and un/conscious’ conditions and rules (Sundberg
Daly argued that the fact that God is presented through masculine terms and symbols has different implications for men and women. The masculine representation of God proposes no problem to males, whereas women may feel alienated from the Image of God. The maleness of God, as reflected throughout history, has had a profound effect on some women's self-identity. These women find it difficult to identify with a male God as they feel that, since they have not been created in the Image of God, they are denied full humanity. Not only have women been excluded from the Image of God, they have also been denied creative expression. Historically, women had been excluded from participating in public and private spheres, which naturally included the church.
Some women find it difficult to relate to masculine terms for naming God, such as the God of Israel, the Father of Jesus, and the Father of all believers. The idea of God as a patriarch affects society, the individual believer, and impacts on our perceptions of gender. The impact of religious identity is ‘widely recognized as important in creating cultural communities, which in turn directly influence their adherent's attitudes and behaviour toward gender roles in society’ (Keysar & Kosmin
For Daly, patriarchal views on women as being inferior had dire consequences, including that women find it difficult to identify with God and men. Women have been labelled many things: defective and misbegotten, sick she-asses, hideous tapeworms, the posts to hell, the most savage of beasts, full of lust, the origin of sin through Eve, mere helpmates to men, not created in the image of God, inferior, and as only good for procreation. For many women, these hurtful and derogatory descriptions lead them to question both God and whether they could bear this dominant image of God.
Both women and men find our identity, and that of God, in the images and symbols of God. We use language, metaphors and symbols to articulate our experience, self-identity, and views on God, ourselves, and the world at large. Language and symbols, however, can restrict our ability to speak about God.
On a personal note, and with specific reference to the gender of God, I question whether we indeed can speak about God in gender terms. Whilst Daly argues that male language inseparably links male dominance and God, I contest this. When we speak of the fatherhood of God, we are using symbolism and I believe that this does not include or imply women's subordination. God's supposed maleness should, on the contrary, never permit, nor legitimise the oppression and subordination of women. The term
In conclusion, I concur with Heyward (
The aim of this article was to evaluate the four main players in Daly's quadripartite patriarchal theological and philosophical paradigm, namely the patriarchal male, the patriarchal female, the patriarchal God and the biophilic woman. I contend that we can hardly accept that it is possible to engage with Daly in the further development of Christian teaching in a meaningful and constructive manner since Daly wrote and focused mainly on the Daly-story.
The author declares that she has no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced her in writing this article.