Another mega-Christian-Celebrity-bro bites the dust, and it makes the rounds. His fall from grace creates a social media undertow, but what about the undertow in the real world? The wife. The kids. The women he used and abused. The church he conned. A literary agent calls, says,

“Just give him a year or two and he’ll be back on the stage.” She’s a good woman, and her tone is both fire and resignation, a timbre I’ve never mastered as a man living in a bros world.

She names names: Mega-Christian-Men™ who’ve risen, fell, risen again. Call it grace, she says. Whatever. It’s wrong.

She says something about weak men hiding in church leadership. It is a sledgehammer.

I might not be a church leader, but I am a man. She's speaking to me, too?

And so, I write a list of strong men I know who still make good with religion, or God, or faith, or whatever. Strong—a helluva word. By it, I do not mean “masculine” or “alpha” or some other piss

that makes sense in a frat house or at shooting range or over a boardroom table. I don’t exactly mean “character” either, because that word has been coopted by weak. (So many masks to wear; so many virtues to signal while you're chasing some vice.)

Strong is, maybe, a word characterized by the good men I know.

@johnblase: His life is summed up in his love of poetry and his slowness to speak.

@winncollier: Less a pastor and more of a pastoralist, he does more work with a handful than Driscoll's done with a stadium.

There are others.

@shawnsmucker: His fiction is marked by a tenderness only matched by the tenderness for his wife and children.

@NatePyle79: Who undoes masculine tropes for the sake of our souls.

My friends Nicholas, Jesse, and Joseph, who meet at the barn at the barn for coffee and fat-chewing. These fellas stick closer than any brother.

Fr. Jack Harris, who once taught me that a man's actions speak much louder than the trash he talks on the court.

The actual strong men are silenced by the Mega-Christian-Men™ who fill stadiums or sell books or command attention for their own egos. They beg us to stroke their egos (or whatever). They ask for grace, which means giving them the stage again so they can poison us again.

I won't bend my ear to their egos. I suggest you don't, either.

So, look for the poets, the pastoralists, the novelists, the fat-chewing men who honor their wives, their faiths, and their friends. They bide their time, knowing eternity is a long stretch. Listen to *them.*

(Which is not to say "don't listen to the women." There are a good lot of them speaking a longer truth, too. But since this is a thread about men, I referenced other men.)