Mary Daly, the high priestess of American Radical Feminism, has a new glint in her crusading eye. Thirty years after she was sacked from her job teaching theology at Boston College - where she was subsequently reinstated thanks to a four-month campaign by her then all-male students - it has happened again.

Last September Duane Naquin tried to enrol for Daly's course on feminist ethics. She told him that, although he couldn't attend her classes - they were women only - she would organise a one-to-one alternative as had happened several times before to everyone's apparent satisfaction. The offer was refused, and Naquin, sponsored by the Centre for Individual Rights, sued the college for sexual discrimination.

Daly believes that the whole exercise was a put up job, as the CIR is a rightwing organisation whose goal is breaking down legislation that currently allows positive discrimination in respect of ethnic or other minorities - which in their agenda includes women. As for Duane, he now works for a right-wing (male) politician.

Far from supporting its employee, Boston College chose to sack her, or as near to that as her employment contract would allow (she has tenure for life). While Daly believes she is on leave of absence, Boston College says she has retired (she is now 70). Daly is currently suing the college for breach of contract. The reaction of her employer - a Jesuit-funded and run private university - is hardly surprising given that Daly has been a thorn in its flesh ever since she renounced Catholicism, and indeed Christianity, in 1971.

The church, she came to believe, has always been a hotbed of misogyny and a weapon in the male armoury for intimidating women. And Christianity itself, with its emphasis upon the all-male trinity, reinforces the patriarchy that she believes is responsible for most of society's ills, from war to the destruction of the planet via genetic engineering and economic greed.

Although the whole business is obviously upsetting - teaching is Daly's life - she cannot disguise her glee at the timing, which has coincided with the publication of her seventh book, Quintessence. Media interest in such issues is high, as the appropriation of women's space, she says, is currently "a very hot subject, with Radcliffe College being eaten up by Harvard", and every bit of publicity helps.

Reading any Mary Daly book is not a task to be undertaken lightly. In the absence of a vocabulary that adequately suits her task, she has largely invented her own, either by taking existing words and redefining them, or inventing new ones by cannibalising others, all of which takes a bit of de-coding - not helped by a maverick use of capitals.

Take the title of her latest book, Quintessence - Realizing the Archaic Future - a Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto.

"Quintessence," she writes in her introduction "is a Name for what Wild Women have always been seeking. It has a misty quality about it . . . it means throwing one's life as far as it will go . . . Quintessence is not a noun but a Verb. It attracts us Magnetically into a Vast and Luminous context. And it is perfectly natural that we should move and thrive in its Wondrous Realms." Quintessence looks at the world we inhabit in the late 1990s from a distance of 50 years, when a half-apocalypse has destroyed most of the existing world but has revealed a new island - the island of Lost And Found, inhabited entirely by women.

In person Mary Daly is far less bizarre than her writing would suggest. Her 70 years sit lightly on her. She is white-sneakered and trim. Her face beams, as unstressed as a child, only a shaking hand as she pours the tea betrays any physical weakness. Her apocalyptic view of the future is based on Mayan prophecies, many of which she believes are already happening - global warming, increase in volcanic activity, extinction of animal species. All these ills, she sees as emanating from the patriarchal society, the "rich white men" who run our institutions - educational, commercial, economic and religious. Central to this horror, she believes, is genetic engineering, particularly cloning. And, although next Monday's lecture at Trinity College has no title, she is tempted - given her predilection for wordplay - by Cloning as a Manifestation of the Trinity.

The media are another manifestation of the patriarchy. (Rupert Murdoch recently took over the publishing house which published three of her books and which are now out of print.) In the American press, she says, there is no public debate about genetic engineering of vegetables or animal cloning.

"Things are better in Europe, I know, but in my country - though as a woman I have no country, as Virginia Woolf said - the news is really a dis-information service. What they do is avoid important topics. We had to hear about Clinton's penis for months - that kind of behaviour. They occupy brains with nothingness. It's a moronisation process."

In spite of all this, Mary Daly - both in Quintessence and in person - remains optimistic. Yet surely, I suggest, her 50-years-hence Utopia of the island of Lost and Found is nothing more than literary device to view the end of the 1990s with historical detachment?

"I'm not denying that there's fiction in here - science fiction. This is just me on a trip to the future, I don't say I'm a channeller. I don't claim any of those powers, I just use my imagination. And I'm not a great science fiction writer; I write philosophy but I had to do this, I had to stir up women's imagination."

The problem is, she acknowledges, is that the so-called advances achieved by feminists have turned women into ersatz men who are not motivated to fight for anything, "the assimilated, who are masked by their false selves", while young people take a superficial equality for granted without being taught anything of the past. Girl students at Boston College, she says, no longer know whether they have been raped.

The woman who might have opened their eyes is not listed in the college prospectus for the coming year. She believes she will win her case, but winning for Mary Daly could mean accepting a handsome settlement rather than reinstatement. But might it not now be time for her to retire - at least from the all-male environment of a Jesuit college? Her eyes sparkle.

"It was my laboratory where I studied patriarchy. And I shall decide when I retire. To do so under pressure would be like selling my soul. I want to be out there long and strong, and I will be."

Mary Daly will give a talk at the Joly Theatre, Hamilton Building, Trinity College next Monday at 6 p.m. Admittance free

Quintessence - Realising the Archaic Future is published by the Women's Press, £8.99 in UK.