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Insofar as most farming and otherwise agrarian families are still primarily male head-of-household families, examining the challenges facing agrarian communities is necessarily to examine the challenges facing the agrarian male. Those challenges fall mainly into two categories—economic and environmental (or ecological). Men in agrarian communities are wrestling specifically with the constrictions of (1) the increasing agribusiness pressures that continue to endanger the small-scale farmer, (2) the "Wal-Martization" of the agrarian economy that not only raises ethical questions but also limits local economic options, and (3) the suburbanization of the land, as more and more farms are sacrificed to economic realities and converted into upscale housing developments for the economically privileged. This essay elucidates a number of the challenges facing agrarian men—whether full-time farmers, part-time farmers, or others embedded in local agrarian communities and their interrelated economic and ecological systems. The intellectual framework draws heavily on the wisdom of eastern Kentucky's own "gentlemen farmer," Wendell Berry, as well as upon a number of ecotheologians, while pragmatically drawing equally heavily on the lived experience of specific men in rural western North Carolina. The paper argues that the 19th-century paradigm of virtually self-sufficient, small family farms no longer works and must be superceded by an alternative 21st-century paradigm of small farms, full- and part-time farm families, and their communities in collaborative networks, thereby collectively challenging the predominating and ever-globalizing 21st-century economic, geopolitical, and environmental status quo.

Metadata only record ; As an alternative to the negative externalities created by agro-industrialism adopted over the latter half of the twentieth century, the European Union has now adopted a policy of agro-food diversification. While this policy has been viewed as a gateway to a sustainable agriculture development, it presents unique challenges to agricultural business owners as they attempt to switch production ethics. This research follows the transition of farmers in England as they attempt to take advantage personal social assets, contacts incentives and resources offered by the government in this process. Incorporating methodologies from the recent "relational turn" in economic geography, the research follows how individuals utilize personal networks and existing business contacts as they move into more diversified production systems. Agro-food diversification is characterized as a dynamic and challenging process that requires a significant shift in outlook from a specialization and yield maximization to a more substantive investment in social networks to build business economies of scope and synergy for a diversified agribusiness.

This brief review essay examines the intersection(s) of numerous tracks—railroads and model railroading; race, class, and gender; southern fiction, literary criticism, and apocalypse studies; and both postmodernist and autobiographical or "story" theology—insofar as these converging lines shape the theory and praxis of men's studies and liberation theology and ethics, especially for white, southern, male scholars still struggling with issues of race and region in our various disciplinary endeavors.

This essay continues to examine certain connections between masculinity, economics and ecotheology, and global violence (cf., Clark, 2002b), by focusing primarily on a single, recently published text, God in the Balance: Christian Spirituality in Times of Terror (Heyward, 2002). Heyward's "peace theology" will be set alongside a metaphorical, apocalyptic reading of current events, not only to better understand global terrorism and U.S. responses to such violence, but also to begin articulating alternatives to any violence that is fueled by human desperation. To that end, theories of nonviolence and both environmental and socioeconomic justice will also be explored.

Both Susan Faludi's Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (text) and the film Fight Club (image) insist that men have been emasculated by consumerism; that the post-war legacy of the so-called good life has shifted men from active, heroic, confrontational roles into the passive, ornamental roles usually assigned to women; and that, without a Great Depression, or Great War, or any other dragon to slay, emasculated men have become imprisoned in their job cubicles and possessed by their possessions, often with not only negative, but even violent repercussions. Ecofeminism and ecotheology provide the tools for better understanding this idolatrous false god of consumerism, as well as for beginning to explore how the economics of plenty affect seemingly privileged men. Importantly, however, this study does not further privilege the already privileged, but seeks instead to understand how the globalizing economy negatively impacts both the human poor and the nonhuman ecosystems which altogether constitute our fragile planet (including population growth and environmental racism). Finally, the essay pushes beyond deconstructive criticism to explore "green" alternatives—at once returning to the masculinity/economics issues in popular culture, insisting on the need for both an economic theory and a value system that do not reduce all value to monetary terms, and seeking a renewed commitment to relational justice in ecosystemic communities. Here, Faludi and Fight Club part company, the latter focusing not on community but upon the heterosexist isolationism and individualism which others argue is a symptom, perhaps even a cause, and certainly not the solution for our current economic and environmental woes.

Previously in this journal (Clark, 1999), I developed a new midrashic layer for apocalypse studies, delineating a possible queer reading of apocalypse based on and responding to the earlier feminist reading of apocalypse by Catherine Keller (1996) in tandem with the sexual ecology of Gabriel Rotello (1997). At the end of this deconstructive project, I began to elaborate a counter-apocalyptic alternative: long-term and monogamously committed same-sex couples. In an effort now to more fully undertake such reconstructive work, I argue in the present essay that reconstructing sexual ethics through profeminist and men's studies-friendly analyses provides us with important ways to skirt, to avoid, and to counter apocalyptic tendencies within and among us. To that end I examine the importance of the erotic, of appropriate self-love, and of sexual pleasure in our lives, as well as the values of relationality and responsibility for sexual ethics.

This essay addresses the future of men's studies from the particular ecolocation of a gay male theologian in the field of men's studies. The essay argues that our "trajectories" for men's studies must fuse theory and practice. Our efforts must be practical as well as intellectual as we engage, however belatedly, in doing constructive theology and ethics (both individually and collaboratively), in increasing our men's studies publishing output to reach larger audiences, and in creating justice in our interpersonal relationships, in our shared social justice activism, and in our hiring and promotion activities.

This essay examines the meanings of gay marginalization/ghettoization and HIV/AIDS through the lens of Catherine Keller's (1996) most recent work, Apocalypse Now and Then. As I read her text about John's text, like the rabbinical commentators of old, I literally inscribed the margins of her text with my responses and insights, creating a marginal text from/with my own marginalization as a gay male (eco)theologian and (sexual) ethicist living with HIV/AIDS. This essay reads off those edges and reads from the margins, weaving together these multiple texts in order to create a speculative, interpretive tool for understanding multiple margin(alization)s within the further (con)text(s) of liberatory religious studies and ethics, men's studies, and queer studies.