Our ideas about what makes a man great have changed over time, and the masculine heroes of the past have been replaced by newer versions of the ideal man we aspire to be or to encounter. Luke Skywalker has supplanted Davy Crockett as a popular icon, for example. The tenacity of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones resonates more with us today than does the dogged persistence of Homer’s Odysseus. But who will be the ideal man of tomorrow? What qualities and characteristics will he possess? As part of our current issue Constructing the New Man, we asked nineteen women what they foresee as the next step for the male half of the species. Here, senior editor Elizabeth Debold speaks with two of them about what it will take for the postmodern man to express a new form of masculinity that combines sensitivity with strength.

Mother Clare Watts is codirector of an esoteric branch of Christian mysticism called the Order of Christ/Sophia, also known as the Centers of Light. She is also an ordained priest and master teacher in the order. Prior to devoting her energies full time to her ecclesiastical functions, she worked as a psychotherapist and a certified professional midwife. Mother Clare is also the author of an autobiographical book, Birth to God: A Woman's Path to Enlightenment, chronicling her life of spiritual seeking.

Jenny Wade is a developmental psychologist whose career has spanned business and academia. She works internationally as a consultant to companies seeking to maximize human potentials and organizational performance; she is an associate professor and researcher at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology; and she is the author of Changes of Mind: A Holonomic Theory of the Evolution of Consciousness and Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil.

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