Male Confessions Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination [Hardcover]

Male Confessionsexamines how men open their intimate lives and thoughts to the public through confessional writing. This book examines writingsby St. Augustine, a Jewish ghetto policeman, an imprisoned Nazi perpetrator, and a gay American theologianthat reflect sincere attempts at introspective and retrospective self-investigation, often triggered by some wounding or rupture and followed by a transformative experience. Krondorfer takes seriously the vulnerability exposed in male self-disclosure while offering a critique of the religious and gendered rhetoric employed in such discourse. The religious imagination, he argues, allows men to talk about their intimate, flawed, and sinful selves without having to condemn themselves or to fear self-erasure. Herein lies the greatest promise of these confessions: by baring their souls to judgment, these writers may also transcend their self-imprisonment.

Krondorfer is one of the pioneers of the field of critical men's studies in religion. In this emerging field men are studied as gendered beings in relation to religion. With this book Krondorfer makes an innovative contribution to the field, and more broadly to the fields of masculinity studies, religious studies and literary studies, by providing a detailed critical gendered reading of men's confessional writing . . . It is a stylistically well-written and highly original book that offers meaningful readings of men's confessional writings and makes a sophisticated contribution to our understanding of the complicated moral and religious dimensions of men's lives. This is an innovative work of religious studies. Krondorfer's examination of the dynamics of self-disclosure and self-creation in men's confessional writing through the lens of masculinity studies is a valuable contribution. Bj?rn Krondorfer is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Mary's College of Maryland and author ofMen and Masculinities in Christianity and Judaism(2009) andRemembrancl£Ý