This is a test

In order to be better able to help other contributors to this blog navigate the process of accepting an invitation to the blog, signing on, and posting, I have created a new avatar, test pirate. I am Amazon Grace, and I have been blogging under that name for a little more than two years.

Amazon Grace is, as you may know, the title of Mary Daly's final book. I didn't know that when I adopted it as my blogging name. I picked it because Grace is my middle name, and the play on words occurred to me, and I couldn't resist it. When we were planning to start the Mary Daly group, I decided to reacquaint myself with Daly's work, and found that my blog name was also the title of a book that Daly had published in 2006. This is an example of what Daly calls Syn-Crone-icities, defined in the Wickedary as :"`coincidences' experienced and recognized by Crones as Strangely significant."

This illustrates one of my favorite things about Mary Daly, the way that she plays with language and invents new words. For Mary Daly, liberation is not about following rules, it's about playfulness and thinking outside the box.

So this new avatar was deliberately chosen to use another concept from Mary Daly, the concept of being a pirate, as quoted by Deborah Barlow on the blog Slow Muse:

“Ever 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.’ ’’

Here's hoping you have a sin-ful day, in Daly's sense of the word.

(By the way, once you create your account and sign in, if you look around on your Dashboard, you will see a link that says "view blog." Click it, and the blog will automagically appear.)

We know you're out there...

Since sometime early this year--maybe it was February--a group of women has been meeting at Church of the Open Arms in Oklahoma City to read the works of radical feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly.Our inspiration for this group was Daly's death at the beginning of January. Some of us knew her books from many years ago, and some of us had never heard of her before the group started meeting, but we knew she'd had a very large effect on feminist thought, and we wanted to learn more about her. We stared out by reading her first feminist book The Church and the Second Sex, and moved next to her intellectual autobiography, Outercourse.

Reading Mary Daly is challenging and exciting. Her thoughts have provoked us to deep analysis of our own lives and situations as women, much fine storytelling, and eating of snacks. We know that when she died, many women expressed their grief at her passing and appreciationg of her work. We think that there must be other women out there who are doing something like what we are doing, and we want to reach out to them. We want to be part of resurgent radical feminist Movement. So, if you find this, let us know what you think and what you've been doing.

The other current attendees of the group have been invited to join this blog, and I'm waiting to hear from you.