The Complementarity of Women and Men provides a Catholic Christian case that men and women are in certain respects quite different but also have a positive, synergistic complementary relationship. Although differences and their mutually supporting relationships are focused on throughout the volume, men and women are assumed to have equal dignity and value. This underlying interpretation comes from the familiar, basic theological position in Genesis that both sexes were made in the image of God. After a cogent philosophical introduction to complementary differences by J. Budziszewski, this position is developed from theological, philosophical, and historical perspectives by Sr. Prudence Allen. Next Deborah Savage, building upon the writings of St. John Paul II, gives a strong theological basis for complementarity. This is followed by Elizabeth Lev’s chapter presenting new and surprising art history evidence from the paintings of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel supporting the complementarity interpretation. A final chapter by Paul Vitz documents and summarizes the scientific evidence supporting sexual difference and complementarity in the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience. As a consequence of both the individual chapters and the integrated understanding they present The Complementarity of Women and Men is a significant contribution to the important, complex, contemporary debate about men, women, sex, and gender.

Few books have explored in depth the lack of men in the churches. Podles’ book The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity was the first book-length attempt to examine this phenomenon. David Murrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church was a popular presentation of Podles’ material. Marta Trzebiatowska’s and Steve Bruce’s short Why Are Women More Religious than Men? confines itself almost entirely to modern British and American examples.
      Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity explores the causes and consequences of the almost millennium-old disparity between the participation of lay men and lay women in the churches of Western Christianity. Podles considers both the anecdotal and statistical evidence for the lack of men: sermons, church rolls, censuses, and sociological analyses.
     Podles sees the intellectual roots of lack of men in the Aristotelian understanding of male and female as active and passive, an understanding which has formed all discussion of masculinity and femininity, from Aquinas through Schleiermacher, Barth, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, all of whom saw femininity as more compatible with Christianity than masculinity. Men, according to anthropologists and psychologists, go through a difficult process to attain masculinity and therefore distance themselves from threats to that masculine identity, including Christianity.
     Men suspected the clergy was effeminate and sexually irregular. Historians of violence have examined the decline in violence in Europe and the civilizing role of the clergy, a role which further alienated men and led to violent anticlericalism
      Podles examines the presentation of Jesus’ masculinity in Scripture and images of Jesus’ masculinity in art, the role of thumos in spirituality, and the various movements that have helped keep men connected to the churches. He makes suggestions for possible outreach to men.