In today's rapidly changing society, the rules you learned as a child may no longer apply, causing you to experience restlessness and confusion. The Eight Masks of Men: A Practical Guide in Spiritual Growth for Men of the Christian Faith will encourage you to come out from behind your mask of solitude and loneliness--one of man's most obtrusive masks--and reach out for help and community. By answering questions commonly asked by men of various religious and personal backgrounds, this book will help you tune into your feelings, innermost thoughts, and that void you feel inside. As you become consciously aware of how the eight masks are a part of your being, you will recognize the true gift beneath each one.The Eight Masks of Men is the first book to combine historical, theological, and sociological perspectives with a practical approach for personal growth. To help you divest yourself of your inhibitions and experience inner harmony, it blends personal stories, humorous anecdotes, biblical research, and clinical information. The eight masks that men wear and what they hide that author Rev. Dr. Frederick G. Grosse explores include: mask: loneliness; hides: desire for community mask: rage and anger; hide: pain and hurt mask: compulsion; hides: desire for love mask: performance; hides: desire for acceptance mask: control; hides: desire for friendship mask: producing; hides: desire to just "be" mask: competition; hides: desire for humility mask: institutional religion; hides: desire for spiritual growth Don't let tragedy or desperation strike before you commit to building a healthier relationship with yourself, the people important to you, and God. Men who feel out of touch with their spiritual sides, retreat and spiritual direction leaders, pastoral counselors, chaplains, marriage and family counselors, and members of the clergy will find in The Eight Masks of Men the inspiration and insight they need to guide themselves and one another to a season of union with God.

In any decade the work of only a very few artists offers a template for understanding the culture and ideas of their time. Photographer Diane Arbus is one of these rare artists, and in this book Frederick Gross returns Arbus's work to the moment in which it was produced and first viewed to reveal its broader significance for analyzing and mapping the culture of the 1960s. While providing a unique view of the social, literary, and artistic context within which Arbus worked, he also, perhaps for the first time anywhere, measures the true breadth and complexity of her achievement. Gross considers Arbus less in terms of her often mythologized biography-a "Sylvia Plath with a camera"-but rather looks at how her work resonates with significant photographic portraiture, art, social currents, theoretical positions, and literature of her times, from Robert Frank and Richard Avedon to Andy Warhol and Truman Capote. He shows how her incandescent photographs seem to literalize old notions of photography as trapping a layer of the subject's soul within the frame of a picture. For Arbus, "auguries"-as in "Auguries of Innocence," her 1963 photographic spread in Harper's Bazaar-conveyed the idea that whoever was present in her photograph could attain legendary status. By shifting critical attention from the myths of Arbus's biography to the mythmaking of her art, this book gives us a new, informed appreciation of one of the twentieth century's most important photographers and a better understanding of the world in which she worked.