A More Dalyan Christianity

With the publication of Beyond God the Father in 1973, Mary Daly publicly declared Christianity to be irredeemably patriarchal and oppressive to women and brothers, “if there are any here”. At the time of writing Catholicism: End or Beginning? , however, Daly still laid claim to her religious tradition and considered it to be a living faith. For Daly, the Catholic substance and the Protestant principle are radical elements and resources within Christianity that must be centralized anew. In this essay, I argue that by taking Daly’s challenge seriously, those who continue to identify as Christian can embody the authentic faith she envisioned – one that calls for both critique and transformation. This faith reintegrates the Catholic substance and Protestant principle simultaneously, while also reviving two essential dimensions of being church: the death of “symbols [that] no longer speak to our age,” and a conscious awareness that the divine resides deeply within the human self. Drawing on Daly’s manuscript, I outline three defining marks and three core sensibilities of a Dalyan ecclesiology – one that remains profoundly relevant today as a safeguard against the church becoming what she called a “mummified bod[y].”