MALONE, Mary T. 1938-

PERSONAL:

Female. Born August 10, 1938, in Wexford, Ireland; daughter of James Dominic and Ellen Agnes (Nixon) Malone; married Michael James Mc-Carroll, November 1, 1980 (died, 1987). Ethnicity: "Irish." Education: National University of Ireland, University College, Dublin, B.A. (with honors), 1962; Victoria University of Manchester, B.Ed., 1963; University of Toronto, M.A., 1965, Ph.D., 1971. Politics: "Feminist." Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Music, walking, gardening, local history.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Villamoyra, Killeens, County Wexford, Ireland. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Toronto School of Theology, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, assistant professor of church history at St. Augustine's Seminary, 1974-87; St. Jerome's University, Waterloo, Ontario, associate professor of religious studies, 1987-98; retired.

MEMBER:

Women's History Association of Ireland.

WRITINGS:

Women Christian: New Vision, W. C. Brown (Dubuque, IA), 1985.

Women and Christianity, Volume 1: The First Thousand Years, Volume 2: From 1000 to the Reformation, Volume 3: From the Reformation to the Twenty-first Century, Columba Press (Blackrock, County Dublin, Ireland), 2000-2002, Orbis Books (Maryknoll, NY), 2001-2003.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Research on women in world religions.

SIDELIGHTS:

Mary T. Malone told CA: "I was born in Wexford, Ireland, the third child and eldest girl in a family of eight. It was the presence of two older brothers and their frequent teaching about the absence of any 'great women' in the perceived landscape of family and national story that set me on my life journey. The search for women became both a personal and scholarly life endeavor. Growing up in comparative poverty in the Roman Catholic environs of a small Irish village has left a perpetual mark on this journey—the assurance of familial support, the ability to see life from the underside, the appreciation of both the spiritual and political side of religion, the inescapable need to understand the implications of national origin, and the realization of the complexity of relationships between women and men at every level, from the most intimate to the most universal.

"The effort to place women firmly in their extraordinarily influential context within the Christian story has become a life task. The difficulties, however, are almost insurmountable. Since women were deprived of voice and authority in the Christian tradition (as in all others, almost without exception), the sources for the telling of the stories of women must be sought out and analyzed. It is often a work of historical imagination as well as historical analysis, but this should not cause surprise, since the usual male telling of the story easily imagined a world without the presence of women—an even greater imaginative leap!

"My current writing is directly related to my retirement from almost thirty years of university teaching in 1998 and my subsequent reflection on the teacher-learner transactions of that life. What had been learned about women? How relevant is this to women of today? What links us to the women of the first, fourth, fourteenth, and nineteenth centuries? The realization of the unbroken chain of experience and aspiration is a constant impetus to the discovery of the whys and wherefores of women's journey. It also provides a challenge to pass on to the next generation a world that will be more just, more open, and more user-friendly to all women, and to all marginalized peoples."