Editor's Note | Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality

Editor's Note
Joseph Gelfer

This edition of JMMS offers an intriguing mix of papers, providing an excellent example of the diversity of the study of men, masculinities and religion.
     Björn Krondorfer starts off with an examination of the confessional writings of National Socialist perpetrator Oswald Pohl. After his imprisonment for war crimes, Pohl converted to Catholicism and published the conversion narrative Credo: Mein Weg zu Gott (Credo: My Path to God). Krondorfer questions whether genocidal perpetrators are capable of genuine confessional writings. Reading the gendered nature of Pohl’s Credo, Krondorfer goes on to argue that religion assisted in negotiating a crisis of postwar German masculinity. Interested readers of German are directed to several books related to the holocaust edited by Krondorfer: Das Vermächtnis annehmen: Kulturelle und biographische Zugänge zum Holocaust: Beiträge aus den USA und Deutschland, co-edited with B. Huhnke (Psychosozial Verlag, 2002); Von Gott reden im Land der Täter: Theologische Stimmen der dritten Generation seit der Shoah, co-edited with Katharina von Kellenbach and Norbert Reck (Wissenschaftlicher Buchverlag, 2001); Mit Blick auf die Täter: Fragen an die deutsche Theologie nach 1945, co-edited with Katharina von Kellenbach and Norbert Reck (Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006).
     In his article, Neil Pembroke engages “narratives of silence” in a spirituality of fathering, framed by the concept of “availability” as developed by the Catholic French philosopher, Gabriel Marcel. Pembroke argues that these narratives of silence are not necessarily, as often reported, ones of withdrawal and absence; instead they may follow three positive modalities: restraint, self-giving, and listening. Interested readers are directed to Pembroke’s recent works, Renewing Pastoral Practice: Trinitarian Perspectives on Pastoral Care and Counselling (Ashgate, 2006) and Moving Toward Spiritual Maturity: Psychological, Contemplative, and Moral Challenges in Christian Living (Haworth Pastoral Press, 2007).
     Peter Bray’s article offers the unusual combination of William Shakespeare and Stan Grof’s concept of “spiritual emergency.” Bray argues that the death of his son and father caused Shakespeare to undergo a series of transformative spiritual emergency events, which are traceable within the text of Hamlet; these events provide a lens through which to view masculine coping mechanisms for grief and loss.
     Our final paper from Anton Karl Kozlovic examines how masculinity functions within the biblical cinema of Cecil B. DeMille. Kozlovic argues that much of DeMille’s trademark cinematic style was based on a particular type of macho masculinity that manifest not just in DeMille’s biblical characters but also in his directorial methods and personal values.

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The book review section contains three reviews. Robert J. Myles looks at Philip Culbertson, Margaret Agee and Cabrini ‘Ofa Makasiale’s edited collection, Penina Uliuli: Contemporary Challenges in Mental Health for Pacific Peoples which includes chapters focusing on constructions of the Pacific male body. Saheed Aderinto reads Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell’s edited collection, African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present. Interested readers should refer back to the first issue of JMMS which contains a reprint from this volume with a specifically religious focus: Frank A. Salamone’s “Hausa Concepts of Masculinity and the ‘Yan Daudu.” Finally, Nathan Abrams brings the issue to a climax, as it were, by pondering some of the religious dimensions that might have been explored in Murat Aydemir’s, Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning.