Bio for Mary O'Keefe Daly
My name is Mary Daly. This is a common name, because all the Irish families in the world, for several hundreds of years, have named their daughters, and even sometimes their sons, after our Lady. When I was in a Catholic high school, I was once in a math class with 12 students, five of whom were named Mary. Although the name is slightly less common now, it is a fashion not likely to die while Jesus lives.
Among the innumerable host of Mary Dalys, there is one writer of enviable competence and considerable fame who has a poor reputation among orthodox Catholics. It has been suggested that I alter my own name so as not to be confused with her.
What? Can I leave her the first claim to a name that represents both the Emerald Isle and the Queen of Angels? With your help, I would rather redeem it.
I live in South Dakota in the house where I have raised five children over the last 30 years or so, meantime sending a few little ones on, and where I have also undertaken to submit my small part towards cultural renewal, first by writing books about sentence diagrams so people can think more clearly, and then by writing the science texts I always wanted while I was teaching my own children. I have several other books in various stages of completion, and have also published some of the writings of my immediate family, on poetry and science both.
One more piece of background is relevant to the science materials which some people find controversial. I was out of the Church for a period of time, and although I do not discount the role of plain sinfulness in that episode, I maintain that some part of it was related to the incoherence of the common presentation of the relationship between faith and science. Since my return to our Mother Church, I have resolved that nobody in my circle of influence will suffer that particular temptation.
That is my mission, and it is not my only mission, but it is one that family connections have made particularly urgent because these have provided me with an unusual collection of insights that are not generally available together, although each one is in the public domain.
My writing is orthodox, not only in my own opinion and intention, but in the opinion of the diocesan censor where I live.
I have never taught at Boston College, or indeed at any college. For one thing, I do not have a PhD, or even an MA (of the academic sort).
I do have a strong opinion about patriarchy.
Patriarchy is the first major step, historically, in the liberation of women. A woman always knows she is the mother of her child, and at the moment of birth, so does everyone else. Men can always say, "Who, me?" leaving the woman with the task of caring for the child in every way. It is when a man says, "This one's mine; I'm going to see that he's okay," that a woman gets the support she needs and can have a full and rich life. It can happen that patriarchy goes astray and becomes mere chauvinism, leaving the woman under the doormat, but as a first step, it is liberating, and we ditch it at our peril.
I also have a strong opinion about women being kept out of the sacred precincts of the Temple.
Again, a major step in women's liberation was accomplished when temple prostitution was rejected by a major world religion, and the cunning idea that sex, particularly sex outside family, is actually a "religious" experience was flatly rejected.
Many women now seek to "enter the temple precincts" as ordained ministers. Well, part of the reason for this is that women do have religious leadership charisms which are not well able to function in a culture of divorce and Protestantism. The founding of religious orders and the family vocation may be rendered impractical in these cultural vacuums, and the only visible road for women's religious leadership is the men's. But I do not see the great religious women of our time in history seeking ordination; they seem to keep busy without it. Catholicism offers women certain opportunities that are hard to come by elsewhere.
There is a solution for those who live "elsewhere": cross the Tiber.
So what else do you want to know about me?
I make good granola and good bread. I greatly enjoy housekeeping for about 2 hours a week, which is not enough to earn me any titles. I’m learning to draw. I have studied Italian with Rosetta Stone and French with TinTin and I made a quilt in 2007.
I’m generally hospitable, if you’re not too picky about housekeeping, and I live close to an interstate highway when I’m not traveling. This summer I drove from California to New Hampshire.
I like bonfires.
I like Chesterton. I love Tolkein and believe he is the greatest writer since Shakespeare, that wonderful dissident Catholic writer of the late 16th and early 17th century. I delight in Hopkins, but you already know that.
I teach science once a week for about 22 weeks of the year, in the local homeschool cooperative sponsored by St. Margaret’s Fellowship. We’re a diocesan Catholic group, open to non-Catholic members, but on our terms and not open to being taken over or shushed by non-Catholics. In the fall of 2007, we studied astronomy for the second round, so I’m writing about it. I have a small introduction to chemistry from spring of 2007, and an introduction to geology as well, explaining basic geology in terms that make it clear why geologists believe the time frame of earth's history is very extended.
I also teach writing to a small group of students in the same age range as my youngest daughter. I am actively but slowly working on an English text, and I may have found an assistant and cheerleader. Don’t hold your breath, but pray. It’s exciting.
Ancestry:
Martha Tulane O’Keefe, the third child of Swedish immigrants in Williams Bay Wisconsin, married John Aloysius O’Keefe, the astronomer whom she met while he was studying at Yerkes Observatory nearby. Of the nine children they raised, I am the fourth.
Here is some information about my father’s work; scroll down 2/3 to find him and Mom:
Although Mom's Swedish immigrant family was repeatedly cheated out of everything they had earned, and was therefore always poor, she went to college partly through the kindness of Mary Frost. Here’s a picture of Mary Frost’s husband, http://astro.uchicago.edu/yerkes/virtualmuseum/Frost.html but it doesn’t say that every year she went to the local high school and asked for the name of the smartest person who would not be going to college for want of money. Then she’d collect enough funds from her friends to give that student a start. That is why my mother received a college education.
My father's father was a medical doctor in Boston, a specialist in allergies, and a friend of the Kennedy family. It is difficult, even now, for me to identify totally with the Republican party, but I oppose abortion and love my country, and have never been considered a feminist except by people who think it evil for women to wear blue jeans.
