I’ve been in a bit of a blissful daze since Hearty Masculinity was published (thank you to my readers for indulging me with too many posts focused on the book), and some of that has to do with my slowing down for a moment to look back at what I did. I went from intending to write a book for men to holding a physical copy in a 13-month period. That said, there were definitely some foreshadowing moments before deciding to write the book that shaped what eventually went into Hearty Masculinity.
2009—Seminary Pastoral Care
One of
the Pastoral Care lectures in Seminary was on ministering to women and
ministering to men. The section on men felt lacking, it boiled down to “watch
out for men who are repressed and traumatized like in the movie The Deer
Hunter.” bell hooks makes this point amazingly in her book The Will to Change. Having ministered for
about 15 years now, I can say this isn’t a wrong assessment by any means, but
it isn’t everything.
2011—Waiting for 1st call
I had an excellent summer living in
the attic of two dear friends in Baltimore while I stayed on the East Coast and
waited for my First Call to ministry. One of the things I did that summer was
read Susan Faludi’s “Stiffed: The Betrayal
of the American Man” which made a case that Masculinity was on a
trajectory away from community and towards posture and ornamentation.
2018—The Shape of Leadership
I got to
be in one of the first years of The Shape of Leadership program that was open
to both men and women (previously it was a program exclusively for Clergywomen).
When we got to the section on gender dynamics in leadership it was lumpy and
lopsided, it felt very similar to that session in Pastoral Care a decade
previous—it was about men not for men.
The portion on men was tentative,
it yearned for a better style of male pastoral leadership, but the closest it
got to something concrete for a man in pastoral leadership could be summed up as something like “Be Like Wendell
Berry” which is good advice, but not universally applicable. I mentioned to a
couple of different people (including Mary Kay Duchene who generously wrote a
blurb for Hearty Masculinity) during that session that someone needs to write
something healthy and good about masculinity. I thought a little bit about what
that might look like.
2018-2019—A Weird Conversation about Consent in a Bar
A young man struck
up a conversation with me in a bar, and it turned to gender dynamics and roles.
At various points in the conversation he repeated, “Women who go to bars can’t
be raped, because they don’t have enough of a self to decide what they want.” At
the time I wasn’t able to get him to tell me where he got this idea.
June 2024—Read Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules
I
eventually read Peterson, and Rule Number 9 is where the guy in bar got the
dangerous idea that women in bars have no self.
In some ways you can thank Peterson
for my book; he helped clarify for me what men were getting out of the
Manosphere: Self-care, goal setting, delayed gratification, making friends, the
art of conversation, and how to listen. These good things just happened to come
with many spoons fully of grievance, self-aggrandizement, and prejudice. He was
a good entry and vantagepoint for me to take in and interpret Red Pill World.
May 2025—I decided that I would like to write something
that would help young men.
The best
thing about discerning
that God wasn’t calling me to put my name in to be Bishop of New Jersey, was
that I don’t have to be Bishop of New Jersey (and even better, someone who is
rocking it IS Bishop); the second best thing was that, in addition to the
negative word of the Spirit, I also got a positive prompting—write a book
for men.
So, I put together a reading and
re-reading list as grist for the mill. Eventually I splayed out about 50 tools
that I felt would be helpful for menfolk, tried to lump them into groups of 10
to end up with a 5 chapter book, and started writing. Quickly I realized my heart
condition was the frame for the book, somewhere along the way I came up with a
clear divide between the first half of the book and the second, and things
shifted enough that a sixth chapter made sense.
October 2025—I finished a first draft of Hearty
Masculinity
I proceeded to revise. I started
querying literary agents and publishers, and 17 rejection slips later, I had a publisher. From there I walked through Wipf
& Stock’s publishing process: hunting down and distinguishing between every
use of an m-dash and an n-dash in the manuscript (I still have nightmares), making
sure every citation was fair use, capturing rogue Cambridge Commas and
replacing them with commas from the Other Place (I jest, Oxford is a fine
school, I’m sure), and generally doing the detail oriented stuff that doesn’t
come naturally to me.
June 2026—Hearty Masculinity published
