About this item
The 1980 rape and murder of four American women - three of them Catholic nuns - by the U.S.-trained military of El Salvador shocked the American public and set off a decade of debate over Cold War policy in Latin America. But as Congress held hearings, the State Department, CIA, and FBI traded memos, and supporters held emotional memorial services, the women themselves became symbols, shorn of context and background: hapless victims.In A Radical Faith, journalist Eileen Markey sets the record straight, exploring the full and complex life of one of these women, Sister Maura Clarke. Raised in a tight-knit Irish Catholic community in Queens, New York during WWII, by the 1970s she was organizing and marching against the dictatorship in Nicaragua and willing to take great risks for a movement to transform El Salvador.
About the Author
Eileen Markey is the editor of Without Compromise: The Brave Journalism that First Exposed Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and the American Epidemic of Corruption, an anthology of the work of legendary investigative reporter Wayne Barrett. She is an assistant professor of journalism at Lehman College of the City University of New York and a veteran NYC policy reporter who learned the power of facts and the joy of digging for them from Village Voice muckraker Wayne Barrett. She has written for, among others, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, The New York Times, City Limits, The Daily News, New York Magazine, WNYC New York Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal and The Village Voice. Her first book, A Radical Faith:The Assassination of Sr. Maura (Bold Type Books/Hachette) is a biography of a US woman killed for her role in the movement for social, political and economic justice in El Salvador in 1980. Markey has lectured widely on the role of religion in radical social movements and the power of resistance in times of tyranny. She is increasingly interested in archives and the role of public memory in shaping allegiances.
