Monday, March 05, 2007
QUALITIES OF LIFE: GOD FOR GUYS
chicagotribune.com
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/q/chi-0703040570mar04,1,2860586.story
QUALITIES OF LIFE: GOD FOR GUYS
Men muscle their way into faith that fits
By Patrick Kampert
Tribune staff reporter
March 4, 2007
Every Monday night, Victor Correnti works on strangers' cars for free.
About 18 months ago, a fishing buddy invited him to help out at something called a "cars ministry" sponsored by Heartland Community Church in Rockford. "I didn't even know what a `ministry' was," said Correnti, 58.
At a volunteer's auto shop, Correnti, who still owns the '55 T-Bird he bought as a high school sophomore, joined about 30 men repairing cars for single moms and needy families. Later, he traveled to Waveland, Miss., after Hurricane Katrina to help maintain generators as Heartland and other churches brought free food, clothing and hot showers to people left homeless by the storm.
It wasn't until weeks later that he first attended a church service at non-denominational Heartland, which has bought and transformed the old Colonial Village shopping mall into its home.
"I've always been a churchgoer, but I've never been a part of things--I've never even been an usher," said Correnti, who says his friendships with the guys at Heartland and the church's "transformational teaching" have turned him into a devoted follower of Christ. He's now part of one of the many Heartland teams that provide free skilled labor to budget-challenged area schools, and he and his longtime girlfriend got married at the church six weeks ago.
For men like Correnti, the chance to put their skills into action as a demonstration of their faith has been, well, a godsend. It's also a key factor in a growing grass-roots men's movement, primarily among evangelicals and Catholics, that sees traditional church culture as more in tune with women's personalities and needs.
"In the main, Christianity domesticates men; it makes them more attentive to the needs and concerns of their wives and children. There are obviously a lot of good things that come from that," said sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia, author of "Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands" (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
But the new movement, typified by David Murrow's book "Why Men Hate Going to Church" (Nelson, 2004), comes from a different angle than the Promise Keepers movement of the 1990s, in which men filled football stadiums and wept about their sins and shortcomings as husbands and dads.
In the new paradigm, churches are "trying to figure out ways to reconnect masculinity to faith," Wilcox said.
From the start, Heartland has been mindful of connecting with men, from rapid-response volunteer teams that seek to serve the community down to the rock-oriented worship songs that appeal to people like Correnti, who says he's partial to the heavy guitars of AC/DC.
"You wear jeans, you see people with tattoos. I've always been an open kind of person," he said. "The music gets you up right from the beginning. And I like being able to have a cup of coffee with my service--just little things like that."
Correnti's experience bears out a recent study by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, which showed that churches are most likely to grow when men make up a majority of the congregation, the atmosphere is less reverent and the music features drums. It also explained why, at a few minutes before 6 a.m. on a freezing Friday in February, Heartland was bustling. All the early arrivers were men, an oddity in a U.S. landscape in which 61 percent of the worshipers on any Sunday morning are female.
By 6:15, organizers were putting out extra rows of seats in the auditorium to accommodate an overflow crowd of 410 males, who were greeted by the strains of Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top as they settled in for the first session to this weekly get-together called Men's Fraternity.
The purpose of this gathering, and thousands like it across the country, was akin to a locker-room pep talk before a big game, inspiring men to find healing from their past, discover what it means to be a man, and to use that masculinity to change their families and their world.
"Christianity may be a man's faith," said Robert Lewis, founder of Men's Fraternity, "but masculinity is his religion."
Lewis began Men's Fraternity in Little Rock, Ark., in 1989. He freely admits he had no grand vision. He was a pastor and a group of men approached him and asked him to develop something for the men in the church because they sensed something was lacking. Now, 17 years later, more than 5,000 Men's Fraternities meet throughout the world. Locally, you'll find them in Joliet, Naperville, Chicago's West Side, New Lenox and Antioch, to name a few. Lewis' books have sold more than a million copies.
So why is this movement emerging now?
Men want a place to process what they're going through in a safe environment, and the 21st Century finds many gender lines blurring. "Few purely male subcultures are left in America," suggested Christianity Today managing editor Mark Galli, author of "Jesus Mean and Wild" (Baker, 2006).
Most American men lacked a ritual or a passage in which they were initiated into manhood, said Mark Bankord, one of the founders of Heartland. If you ask an adult male when he became a man, Bankord said, "the answer is typically around a point at which you made a bad decision or when responsibility went way up in your life: `When I had sex for the first time, when I got thrown out of the house, when I got my first job, when I had my first child.'"
Men sense a need to shake off their friendless isolation in a "very mobile, transitory society" that keeps them running at a dizzying pace, said John Bell, pastor of Grace Pointe Church in Naperville, where he leads a Fraternity-like group called BraveHearts.
"A lot of guys just don't have the skills that friendships require. Other men are seen as competitors," Bell said.
Church culture has become feminized and has little room for men, even though most ministers are male. "When a man comes to church," Galli said, "they tell him you can usher or pass out bulletins. . . . There's not a lot of room for boldness or doing great deeds."
Meaningful activity
If Promise Keepers first exposed this nerve in the Christian male psyche, "Wild at Heart" author John Eldredge taught these men how to rediscover their masculinity. In the 2001 book, which has sold 2 million copies, he encourages men to examine any wounds inflicted by their fathers, to escape into the wilderness to challenge themselves physically, and to form small "bands of brothers" with close friends to help meet the needs that the church establishment had ignored.
Eldredge, who leads retreats in the Colorado wilderness, said he is "delighted" that men are gathering together but warned that the movement must be more than men sitting around talking if it is to last.
"Here's the missing piece," he said. "Unless there are activities where you're doing something as men in which you can discover that you are a man, that you have a strength to offer, this will eventually peter out."
The two biggest fans of Men's Fraternity in Chicago, or at least in Joliet, probably are Mike Cemeno and Lee Swank. Cemeno, a Catholic, and Swank, a Protestant, often work together to promote men's gatherings.
Cemeno, who left his family's popular restaurant business to work full time with a Catholic group called Legionnaires of Christ, said that what he appreciates are the practical action steps that Lewis encourages. He remembers one such lesson vividly.
"You plan an outing with your son, some type of outdoor activity where you get out into nature," Cemeno said. "And you interview your son on how you're doing as a dad. You ask your son where your weaknesses are. It's a dose of humility; it's powerful."
Swank, who is married and has three sons and two daughters, was so impressed by Lewis' book about fathers and sons, "Raising a Modern Day Knight" (Focus on the Family, 1997), that he started a group in 2001 called Modern Day Knights. The group brings together men from dozens of local churches to encourage racial and interdenominational unity in the pursuit of honorable fatherhood.
Building friendships
But the unsung key to these gatherings may simply be the development of male friendships, which is one reason that Fraternities find men from a wide variety of churches or even no church background in attendance.
"This isn't just a faith issue," noted Mark Elfstrand, morning personality for WMBI-FM 90.1 and author of "10 Passions of a Man's Soul" (Moody Publishers, 2006). "Men tend to allow their lives to get so busy that they don't hang out with guys."
A few years ago, Elfstrand took the idea of starting a Men's Fraternity to Bell, who was his pastor at the time at Grace Pointe. Bell embraced the concept and now, years later, Bernd Schoell and Tom Stanczyk, both 33-year-old Lisle residents, were sitting in a pew at Grace Pointe early on a Saturday morning, talking about how the ministry, renamed BraveHearts, had cultivated their own friendship.
They met in a martial arts class six years ago and saw their friendship deepen at BraveHearts. Along with two other friends, they meet weekly to hang out with and pray for one another as they fumble their way through trying to improve their lives.
Schoell's wife, Katie, said she initially was skeptical of the men's group, wondering if it might try to force her into a more traditional role than a woman who is a project manager for a packing and procuring company. "We're pretty equal," she said. "We understand what we both bring to the table is important."
BraveHearts, she said, helped Bernd focus more on other people and taught him how to communicate more effectively as a husband.
Bernd Schoell, born and raised in Germany, said the group has helped him work through some of the hurt from his past. His mother left when he was 4 or 5. He was raised by his father, who was prone to anger-filled rampages and threatened to abandon Bernd and his brother.
The men's group has helped him come to terms with that and learn to deal with his own anger and abandonment issues, he said.
"My dad made mistakes. My mom made mistakes. It boils down to forgiveness. If you don't forgive people, it'll poison your life and then you'll poison other people."
Sarah Stanczyk, Tom's wife of four years, sees the group as a support system. "It's tough to be a man right now in our culture," she said.
A challenging climb
Tom, an avid rock climber who became a Christian 18 months ago, has offered to begin a group at the church that would use climbing as a way for men to get to know one another better. He said he thinks male bonding happens most naturally when men share an activity as opposed to a typical church small group where people talk about their feelings.
Tom sees his hobby as a metaphor for the Christian life.
"As a climber you start out on the easy routes. As you get better, you're not going to stick to the same routes; it doesn't become challenging. As you mature, [God] takes you to different routes. You have to struggle through them and pray for God's help to get through them. Sometimes you may fall, but there's a lesson to be learned and you start up again."
- - -
IN THE BEGINNING
The roots of the movement
The groundwork for this grass-roots movement goes back centuries. But the more recent history seems to be a reaction against the feminization of Christianity that occurred in the 1800s, says University of Notre Dame sociology professor Christian Smith.
"In the 19th Century, there were a lot of moral reform movements and women came to play a more and more prominent role in church organizations," he said. "There was a reconstructing not only of activism but also of Christian culture. Also in the 19th Century, a lot of new hymns were written that are very sweet and domesticated. Some of them are nearly erotic in terms of `walking with Jesus in the garden.' It was sort of a cultural reframing of Christianity from a Victorian female perspective."
As a result, Smith said, Christianity became closely associated with "home and hearth." Today's movement, he said, "creates a general backdrop of `how do men fit into this view of Jesus as kind and tender? How is a man supposed to relate to Jesus?"
In the last century or so, responses came with the advent of "muscular Christianity," which spurred the birth of the YMCA and had Teddy Roosevelt as a proponent. More recently, sports ministries like Athletes in Action and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes took up the cause. But the more modern roots come from two sources: Promise Keepers and the work of author John Eldredge, who was influenced by Robert Bly ("Iron John").
"Promise Keepers discovered the need," said Robert Lewis, founder of Men's Fraternity. "What Promise Keepers didn't do is help men finish the work. They rallied men to realize `I do have these needs, I do have these hurts.' But when they came home, they couldn't process it."
Eldredge, meanwhile, has sold more than 7 million books, including more than 2 million of "Wild at Heart," which counseled Christian men to find what makes them come alive and pour themselves into that. The book also derided the popular image of "gentle Jesus, meek and mild," Eldredge says, and took a fresh look at biblical passages showing the Jewish carpenter as a rugged revolutionary who was bold and daring.
But Eldredge has had zero interest in spinning off "Wild at Heart" franchises around the country. Instead, he encouraged men to come up with their own local plans and execute them.
"Any genuine movement is going to be grass-roots," he said. "The other piece of it is, men need dignity. They need a role to play. Rather than telling them what to do, you empower them to take the lead themselves."
--Patrick Kampert
OTHER FAITHS
For Muslims, Jews, men's role is clear
Christianity has a man problem, said David Murrow, author of "Why Men Hate Going to Church" (Nelson, 2004).
And if churches don't find a solution, he said, "there's a religion out there that's more than happy to show us how to do it, and that's Islam."
Marcia Hermansen, theology professor at Loyola University Chicago, said she is not surprised that some in Christian circles have an appreciation for Muslim gender tradition.
"In modernity, you kind of have a leveling of gender distinctions whereas, in the Muslim world, there is still an acceptance for the most part of what some Muslims call `gender complementary'--vive la difference. Which is usually, guys are guys and women are women, and most men like that system."
Jeffrey Salkin, senior rabbi of The Temple in Atlanta and a noted author on Jewish spirituality and masculinity, said American society--not just Christianity--is the one dealing with "various bogus versions of manhood."
Judaism, Salkin said, offers some clearly defined answers as to what male maturity does and doesn't look like. First, the false side:
"Judaism does not believe we prove manhood through societally approved macho acts like sexual profligacy, violence and the American cowboy ethic of going it alone."
Now, the real side:
"Judaism provides a very tangible definition of manhood, or shall we say maturity: the ability to lead a congregation in worship, the ability to chant, the ability to read the Torah in Hebrew publicly and interpret it, and the ability to impart responsible life to the community."
Masculinity, he said, is often associated in the Gentile world with skills, like the ability to use your hands. But among Jews, manhood is linked with "community building and wisdom sharing."
And if Men's Fraternity helps men deal in a more healthy way with their emotions, they're following an old pattern, Salkin suggested.
"If you look at the Bible, Jewish men cry, they laugh, they express their feelings," he said.
Likewise, the male bonding that seems to play a role in the new American Christian men's movement occurs much more naturally in some Muslim countries, Hermansen said.
"In Western cultures, people are afraid to touch each other or get too close. In many Muslim societies, there aren't those anxieties. You might see men walking down the street holding hands in certain cultures. The same with women."
But in most cases, the Muslim warrior "driving his camel over the desert with his sword unsheathed" is a Western projection, Hermansen said. "Most Muslim guys are as nerdy as the next guy," she said.
--P.K.
The 10 passions of a man's soul:
Purpose
Adventure
Power
Winning
Wealth
Self-preservation
The Hunt
Pleasure
Relationships
Legacy
--From Mark Elfstrand's "10 Passions of a Man's Soul"
----------
pkampert@tribune.com
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/q/chi-0703040570mar04,1,2860586.story
QUALITIES OF LIFE: GOD FOR GUYS
Men muscle their way into faith that fits
By Patrick Kampert
Tribune staff reporter
March 4, 2007
Every Monday night, Victor Correnti works on strangers' cars for free.
About 18 months ago, a fishing buddy invited him to help out at something called a "cars ministry" sponsored by Heartland Community Church in Rockford. "I didn't even know what a `ministry' was," said Correnti, 58.
At a volunteer's auto shop, Correnti, who still owns the '55 T-Bird he bought as a high school sophomore, joined about 30 men repairing cars for single moms and needy families. Later, he traveled to Waveland, Miss., after Hurricane Katrina to help maintain generators as Heartland and other churches brought free food, clothing and hot showers to people left homeless by the storm.
It wasn't until weeks later that he first attended a church service at non-denominational Heartland, which has bought and transformed the old Colonial Village shopping mall into its home.
"I've always been a churchgoer, but I've never been a part of things--I've never even been an usher," said Correnti, who says his friendships with the guys at Heartland and the church's "transformational teaching" have turned him into a devoted follower of Christ. He's now part of one of the many Heartland teams that provide free skilled labor to budget-challenged area schools, and he and his longtime girlfriend got married at the church six weeks ago.
For men like Correnti, the chance to put their skills into action as a demonstration of their faith has been, well, a godsend. It's also a key factor in a growing grass-roots men's movement, primarily among evangelicals and Catholics, that sees traditional church culture as more in tune with women's personalities and needs.
"In the main, Christianity domesticates men; it makes them more attentive to the needs and concerns of their wives and children. There are obviously a lot of good things that come from that," said sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia, author of "Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands" (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
But the new movement, typified by David Murrow's book "Why Men Hate Going to Church" (Nelson, 2004), comes from a different angle than the Promise Keepers movement of the 1990s, in which men filled football stadiums and wept about their sins and shortcomings as husbands and dads.
In the new paradigm, churches are "trying to figure out ways to reconnect masculinity to faith," Wilcox said.
From the start, Heartland has been mindful of connecting with men, from rapid-response volunteer teams that seek to serve the community down to the rock-oriented worship songs that appeal to people like Correnti, who says he's partial to the heavy guitars of AC/DC.
"You wear jeans, you see people with tattoos. I've always been an open kind of person," he said. "The music gets you up right from the beginning. And I like being able to have a cup of coffee with my service--just little things like that."
Correnti's experience bears out a recent study by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, which showed that churches are most likely to grow when men make up a majority of the congregation, the atmosphere is less reverent and the music features drums. It also explained why, at a few minutes before 6 a.m. on a freezing Friday in February, Heartland was bustling. All the early arrivers were men, an oddity in a U.S. landscape in which 61 percent of the worshipers on any Sunday morning are female.
By 6:15, organizers were putting out extra rows of seats in the auditorium to accommodate an overflow crowd of 410 males, who were greeted by the strains of Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top as they settled in for the first session to this weekly get-together called Men's Fraternity.
The purpose of this gathering, and thousands like it across the country, was akin to a locker-room pep talk before a big game, inspiring men to find healing from their past, discover what it means to be a man, and to use that masculinity to change their families and their world.
"Christianity may be a man's faith," said Robert Lewis, founder of Men's Fraternity, "but masculinity is his religion."
Lewis began Men's Fraternity in Little Rock, Ark., in 1989. He freely admits he had no grand vision. He was a pastor and a group of men approached him and asked him to develop something for the men in the church because they sensed something was lacking. Now, 17 years later, more than 5,000 Men's Fraternities meet throughout the world. Locally, you'll find them in Joliet, Naperville, Chicago's West Side, New Lenox and Antioch, to name a few. Lewis' books have sold more than a million copies.
So why is this movement emerging now?
Men want a place to process what they're going through in a safe environment, and the 21st Century finds many gender lines blurring. "Few purely male subcultures are left in America," suggested Christianity Today managing editor Mark Galli, author of "Jesus Mean and Wild" (Baker, 2006).
Most American men lacked a ritual or a passage in which they were initiated into manhood, said Mark Bankord, one of the founders of Heartland. If you ask an adult male when he became a man, Bankord said, "the answer is typically around a point at which you made a bad decision or when responsibility went way up in your life: `When I had sex for the first time, when I got thrown out of the house, when I got my first job, when I had my first child.'"
Men sense a need to shake off their friendless isolation in a "very mobile, transitory society" that keeps them running at a dizzying pace, said John Bell, pastor of Grace Pointe Church in Naperville, where he leads a Fraternity-like group called BraveHearts.
"A lot of guys just don't have the skills that friendships require. Other men are seen as competitors," Bell said.
Church culture has become feminized and has little room for men, even though most ministers are male. "When a man comes to church," Galli said, "they tell him you can usher or pass out bulletins. . . . There's not a lot of room for boldness or doing great deeds."
Meaningful activity
If Promise Keepers first exposed this nerve in the Christian male psyche, "Wild at Heart" author John Eldredge taught these men how to rediscover their masculinity. In the 2001 book, which has sold 2 million copies, he encourages men to examine any wounds inflicted by their fathers, to escape into the wilderness to challenge themselves physically, and to form small "bands of brothers" with close friends to help meet the needs that the church establishment had ignored.
Eldredge, who leads retreats in the Colorado wilderness, said he is "delighted" that men are gathering together but warned that the movement must be more than men sitting around talking if it is to last.
"Here's the missing piece," he said. "Unless there are activities where you're doing something as men in which you can discover that you are a man, that you have a strength to offer, this will eventually peter out."
The two biggest fans of Men's Fraternity in Chicago, or at least in Joliet, probably are Mike Cemeno and Lee Swank. Cemeno, a Catholic, and Swank, a Protestant, often work together to promote men's gatherings.
Cemeno, who left his family's popular restaurant business to work full time with a Catholic group called Legionnaires of Christ, said that what he appreciates are the practical action steps that Lewis encourages. He remembers one such lesson vividly.
"You plan an outing with your son, some type of outdoor activity where you get out into nature," Cemeno said. "And you interview your son on how you're doing as a dad. You ask your son where your weaknesses are. It's a dose of humility; it's powerful."
Swank, who is married and has three sons and two daughters, was so impressed by Lewis' book about fathers and sons, "Raising a Modern Day Knight" (Focus on the Family, 1997), that he started a group in 2001 called Modern Day Knights. The group brings together men from dozens of local churches to encourage racial and interdenominational unity in the pursuit of honorable fatherhood.
Building friendships
But the unsung key to these gatherings may simply be the development of male friendships, which is one reason that Fraternities find men from a wide variety of churches or even no church background in attendance.
"This isn't just a faith issue," noted Mark Elfstrand, morning personality for WMBI-FM 90.1 and author of "10 Passions of a Man's Soul" (Moody Publishers, 2006). "Men tend to allow their lives to get so busy that they don't hang out with guys."
A few years ago, Elfstrand took the idea of starting a Men's Fraternity to Bell, who was his pastor at the time at Grace Pointe. Bell embraced the concept and now, years later, Bernd Schoell and Tom Stanczyk, both 33-year-old Lisle residents, were sitting in a pew at Grace Pointe early on a Saturday morning, talking about how the ministry, renamed BraveHearts, had cultivated their own friendship.
They met in a martial arts class six years ago and saw their friendship deepen at BraveHearts. Along with two other friends, they meet weekly to hang out with and pray for one another as they fumble their way through trying to improve their lives.
Schoell's wife, Katie, said she initially was skeptical of the men's group, wondering if it might try to force her into a more traditional role than a woman who is a project manager for a packing and procuring company. "We're pretty equal," she said. "We understand what we both bring to the table is important."
BraveHearts, she said, helped Bernd focus more on other people and taught him how to communicate more effectively as a husband.
Bernd Schoell, born and raised in Germany, said the group has helped him work through some of the hurt from his past. His mother left when he was 4 or 5. He was raised by his father, who was prone to anger-filled rampages and threatened to abandon Bernd and his brother.
The men's group has helped him come to terms with that and learn to deal with his own anger and abandonment issues, he said.
"My dad made mistakes. My mom made mistakes. It boils down to forgiveness. If you don't forgive people, it'll poison your life and then you'll poison other people."
Sarah Stanczyk, Tom's wife of four years, sees the group as a support system. "It's tough to be a man right now in our culture," she said.
A challenging climb
Tom, an avid rock climber who became a Christian 18 months ago, has offered to begin a group at the church that would use climbing as a way for men to get to know one another better. He said he thinks male bonding happens most naturally when men share an activity as opposed to a typical church small group where people talk about their feelings.
Tom sees his hobby as a metaphor for the Christian life.
"As a climber you start out on the easy routes. As you get better, you're not going to stick to the same routes; it doesn't become challenging. As you mature, [God] takes you to different routes. You have to struggle through them and pray for God's help to get through them. Sometimes you may fall, but there's a lesson to be learned and you start up again."
- - -
IN THE BEGINNING
The roots of the movement
The groundwork for this grass-roots movement goes back centuries. But the more recent history seems to be a reaction against the feminization of Christianity that occurred in the 1800s, says University of Notre Dame sociology professor Christian Smith.
"In the 19th Century, there were a lot of moral reform movements and women came to play a more and more prominent role in church organizations," he said. "There was a reconstructing not only of activism but also of Christian culture. Also in the 19th Century, a lot of new hymns were written that are very sweet and domesticated. Some of them are nearly erotic in terms of `walking with Jesus in the garden.' It was sort of a cultural reframing of Christianity from a Victorian female perspective."
As a result, Smith said, Christianity became closely associated with "home and hearth." Today's movement, he said, "creates a general backdrop of `how do men fit into this view of Jesus as kind and tender? How is a man supposed to relate to Jesus?"
In the last century or so, responses came with the advent of "muscular Christianity," which spurred the birth of the YMCA and had Teddy Roosevelt as a proponent. More recently, sports ministries like Athletes in Action and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes took up the cause. But the more modern roots come from two sources: Promise Keepers and the work of author John Eldredge, who was influenced by Robert Bly ("Iron John").
"Promise Keepers discovered the need," said Robert Lewis, founder of Men's Fraternity. "What Promise Keepers didn't do is help men finish the work. They rallied men to realize `I do have these needs, I do have these hurts.' But when they came home, they couldn't process it."
Eldredge, meanwhile, has sold more than 7 million books, including more than 2 million of "Wild at Heart," which counseled Christian men to find what makes them come alive and pour themselves into that. The book also derided the popular image of "gentle Jesus, meek and mild," Eldredge says, and took a fresh look at biblical passages showing the Jewish carpenter as a rugged revolutionary who was bold and daring.
But Eldredge has had zero interest in spinning off "Wild at Heart" franchises around the country. Instead, he encouraged men to come up with their own local plans and execute them.
"Any genuine movement is going to be grass-roots," he said. "The other piece of it is, men need dignity. They need a role to play. Rather than telling them what to do, you empower them to take the lead themselves."
--Patrick Kampert
OTHER FAITHS
For Muslims, Jews, men's role is clear
Christianity has a man problem, said David Murrow, author of "Why Men Hate Going to Church" (Nelson, 2004).
And if churches don't find a solution, he said, "there's a religion out there that's more than happy to show us how to do it, and that's Islam."
Marcia Hermansen, theology professor at Loyola University Chicago, said she is not surprised that some in Christian circles have an appreciation for Muslim gender tradition.
"In modernity, you kind of have a leveling of gender distinctions whereas, in the Muslim world, there is still an acceptance for the most part of what some Muslims call `gender complementary'--vive la difference. Which is usually, guys are guys and women are women, and most men like that system."
Jeffrey Salkin, senior rabbi of The Temple in Atlanta and a noted author on Jewish spirituality and masculinity, said American society--not just Christianity--is the one dealing with "various bogus versions of manhood."
Judaism, Salkin said, offers some clearly defined answers as to what male maturity does and doesn't look like. First, the false side:
"Judaism does not believe we prove manhood through societally approved macho acts like sexual profligacy, violence and the American cowboy ethic of going it alone."
Now, the real side:
"Judaism provides a very tangible definition of manhood, or shall we say maturity: the ability to lead a congregation in worship, the ability to chant, the ability to read the Torah in Hebrew publicly and interpret it, and the ability to impart responsible life to the community."
Masculinity, he said, is often associated in the Gentile world with skills, like the ability to use your hands. But among Jews, manhood is linked with "community building and wisdom sharing."
And if Men's Fraternity helps men deal in a more healthy way with their emotions, they're following an old pattern, Salkin suggested.
"If you look at the Bible, Jewish men cry, they laugh, they express their feelings," he said.
Likewise, the male bonding that seems to play a role in the new American Christian men's movement occurs much more naturally in some Muslim countries, Hermansen said.
"In Western cultures, people are afraid to touch each other or get too close. In many Muslim societies, there aren't those anxieties. You might see men walking down the street holding hands in certain cultures. The same with women."
But in most cases, the Muslim warrior "driving his camel over the desert with his sword unsheathed" is a Western projection, Hermansen said. "Most Muslim guys are as nerdy as the next guy," she said.
--P.K.
The 10 passions of a man's soul:
Purpose
Adventure
Power
Winning
Wealth
Self-preservation
The Hunt
Pleasure
Relationships
Legacy
--From Mark Elfstrand's "10 Passions of a Man's Soul"
----------
pkampert@tribune.com
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
