Editor's Note
Also in this issue:
How time flies when you’re having editorial fun! Already JMMS is embarking on its second year of publication. Including this issue, JMMS has now published 17 papers and 19 reviews from contributors from a number of different disciplines and countries. The website continues to receive a steady amount of visitors and is finding its way into a growing number of university library databases. With each issue, our reputation grows.
I want to remind potential contributors that JMMS will also consider reprints of articles not available elsewhere on the Internet. For example, you may have published an article in an edited collection which fits the JMMS brief: having this article online with us can significantly expand its readership and citation. All we require is that you have retained copyright to reprint the article, or that you have permission to do so from the original publisher (which they will often grant). Similarly, JMMS will also consider preprints: you may have a suitable paper waiting to come out in an edited collection which, for some reason, has been significantly delayed. All JMMS contributors retain full copyright and control of their material, so you would be free to publish it again later in the collection, assuming its editor is happy with the arrangement. Whichever way, everyone’s a winner having papers from edited collections in JMMS : authors get a wider audience, and readers get access to material they might otherwise never find.
This issue offers an extended article by Lynn Huber entitled, “Sexually Explicit? Re-reading Revelation’s 144,000 Virgins as a Response to Roman Discourses.” In this article Lynn considers the multitude of 144,000 male virgins in the Book of Revelation in relation to the constructions of masculinity in the first-century Roman Empire, suggesting it offers a rejection of the pro-family rhetoric of the Empire and popular depictions of the hyper-masculine male. Readers may like to pursue Lynn’s work further in her new book, Like a Bride Adorned: Reading Metaphor in John's Apocalypse (T & T Clark, 2007). Our second article is Chris Barker’s “Men, Buddhism and the Discontents of Western Modernity.” In this article Chris argues that Buddhist mindfulness can have positive psychotherapeutic value for men who experience a loss of personal meaning under the pressures of late modernity. Readers may like to pursue Chris’ work further in his new book, The Hearts of Men: Tales of Happiness and Despair (University of New South Wales Press, 2007).
In our review section Ken Stone offers a detailed reading of Dale Martin’s Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation. Silvia Mergenthal reads Stefan Horlacher’s “magisterial study,” Masculinities. Konzeptionen von Männlichkeit im Werk von Thomas Hardy und D. H. Lawrence [page 2] [Masculinities: Conceptions of Masculinity in the Works of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence]. Intrigued readers need look no further than the pages of JMMS for more of Horlacher’s work, as his article From a Metaphysics of Presence to the Blessings of Absence: The Medial Construction of Masculine Identity in Thomas Hardy's Novel Jude the Obscure was published here in Vol. 1, No. 2. Mark Justad provides a double review of Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker’s, Every Man’s Battle: Every Man’s Guide to Winning the War on Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Time and Every Young Man’s Battle: Strategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation. Arterburn and Stoeker are not academic writers, but they have a significant influence on the popular discourse surrounding men and Christianity and Mark’s review highlights why this influence is far from ideal. The section closes with Phillip Cantrell’s review of Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa by Marc Epprecht, and Bradford McCall’s review of Do Real Men Pray? Images of the Christian Man and Male Spirituality in White Protestant America by Charles Lippy.
