'And Now We Shall Do Manly Things': 5 stories from a writer exploring hunting culture

Journalist and city-dweller Craig J. Heimbuch explores America's romance with hunting in his new book "And Now We Shall Do Manly Things."

2. Reason for hunting

A hunter in South Dakota Dirk Lammers/AP

Heimbuch says part of what made him want to try hunting was to experience another facet of his role as patriarch in his family, which had recently gained a third child. "I was looking forward to the idea of eating something that I had procured," he wrote. "This felt historically appropriate, like the uncomfortable shoes worn by employees in Colonial Williamsburg. Learning to hunt was not just about bonding with my relatives or feeling like an adult. It was about feeling like a provider."

2 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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