Week 3: In a Time With No Fathers: Forging Intiatatory Pathways

In a Time with No Fathers: Forging Intiatatory Pathways#

A culture needs fathers, as much as it needs fathering. Unfortunately, we are in a cultural moment where we have been robbed of both.

What does it mean to father a culture, and how can we, regardless of where we are on the spectrum of masculinity, participate in this fathering? In this module, we explore the role of culture and community in providing initiatory pathways towards growing up masculine, and/or into men. What happens when there are few initiated men, and an absence of holding? Attempts to reconstruct rites of passage are operating within this crater, and can remain stuck in its fundamental limitations.

How might we collaboratively, life-givingly, initiate and liberate generational men’s work? We explore how we come together in various holding spaces, men’s circles, and communities in which generational work is done. Gathering from our learnings from the opening module, we interrogate the interpersonal in communal contexts, to see how the loss of a fathering culture impacts how we come together to parent men, and how we may do this work better.