A friend of mine clued me in on this recent article by David Murrow. He’s an author whose […]
masculinity
Son, It is necessary in our conversation about being both a good man and being good at being […]
I have a difficult time viewing safety as a virtue. Resilience perhaps, fortitude to be sure, but not just safety. I want my kids to be safe, of course. I want them to take reasonable precautions when doing dangerous or risky things. Safety serves the risk; it serves a life marked by danger. It is calculated and reasonably weighed out. But danger, why, danger is the stuff that makes life worth living. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “As soon as there is life, there is danger.” To elevate safety above engagement is a cowardly and timid way to engage this world.
By Paul Koch – When you hear a man refer to a group of friends as his “church […]
By Paul Koch –
Sometimes it seems as if I’m living in some sort bizarre parallel universe, where the things I learned from my childhood, the things that have helped defined me up to this point no longer seem to matter. Or perhaps a better image would be that of a modern-day Rip Van Winkle. I often find myself wandering through my world, confused by what I see and unsure of how we got here. Perhaps I was asleep while everything was changing, or I didn’t keep up with times. Perhaps I didn’t really care. And now I’m at a loss to explain just what the hell is going on.
By Paul Koch – Consider these two conversations: the first was one I had around a year ago […]
By Paul Koch –
The raising of a son is a noble and daunting task. In these days of safe spaces on college campuses and SJWs arguing over proper pronoun use, it is easy to get overwhelmed as to what is the best course of action. The time-honored traditions handed down from a father to a son are now often portrayed as being out of touch with modern sentiments and no longer needed in a modern society. The traditional understanding of what makes a man a good man and what makes him good at being a man are viewed with a certain disdain and uneasiness.
By Scott Keith –
(Warning: this blog represents a return to my cantankerous Jagged Word roots.)
I have been beating the drum of the loss of masculinity for years now. Writing Being Dad – Father as a Picture of God’s Grace and publishing The Jagged Word Field Guide to Being a Man have both been attempts to push back against the groundswell that has been rolling over men for years. I could again harp on the media and its tiresome portals of men as daft, inept, bumbling fools who know little and do even less. The fact is, it’s still bad. Commercial after commercial fails to show positive portraits of men and dads for our boys and young men to emulate. But I’m not going to put you through that again. I think that you get the point. I hope. I pray.
“Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.” (1 Corinthians 16:13-14)
The Jagged Word has always been a place that encourages meaningful conversation about what is happening in the Church as it intersects with, reacts to, and challenges current cultural trends. The friends that make up The Jagged Word and have written every week for the last few years have found that there are some common topics that tend to come up over and over again. While we certainly see topics of all things church reoccur, such as worship or preaching, we have also noticed that there has been an ongoing discussion about what it means to be a man.
By Paul Koch –
To say that I am not a fan of soccer would be a gross understatement. I am often befuddled by its popularity and cannot understand why parents continue to encourage their children, especially their sons, to participate in this strange sport. I am regularly reminded by passionate sports fans that this is the most popular sport in the world, and therefore, it carries a certain promise of common ground for conversation and experience in our global economy. It is commonly referred to as the beautiful game, and I must admit that when I watch a skilled athlete, there is a majestic beauty that is found in their ability to control a ball with such precision and agility with seemingly no effort.
By Scott Keith –
Over the past several years, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a man. I am not talking specifically about gender or what does or does not hang between one’s legs. I am discussing what the essence of man is, or said more simply, what makes a man what he is.
By Paul Koch –
Last week, I travelled to Fort Wayne, Indiana for the 32nd Annual Symposium on Exegetical Theology and the 40th Annual Symposium on the Lutheran Confessions. These two conferences hosted back to back at the seminary are always packed full of great insights and discussion by top-notch scholars. To be sure, leaving the beautiful confines of Ventura, California to travel to Fort Wayne in the middle of January isn’t always to joyful undertaking. Nonetheless, I go every year. I go for the opportunity to learn and so that I might be a better pastor and teacher, but most of all I go because every year I gather together with a handful of very good friends. It is their presence, their laughter, their banter in the bars late into the night that make it all worthwhile.
By Scott Keith –
This is a question that I ask myself all the time. I’m truly interested in knowing what kind of man I am and how others might answer that question. Perhaps it’s narcissistic of me to wonder such a thing. Maybe I ask myself such a question because I more frequently ask it of others. Often, I find answers in the most unexpected places.
By Paul Koch –
In my experience, women fight differently than men. As a father of five, one boy and four girls, I have witnessed the clear difference in their strategy and tactics. My son seems to have a deep instinctual desire to fight with a physical exchange, a trading of blows to make his point. In fact, you can see the torment he goes through when he restrains from physical retaliation toward one of his sisters because he has been taught from the get-go that you don’t hit girls.
By Joel A Hess –
You don’t hear much about Joseph. He just disappears after the birth of our Lord. He then reappears when Jesus scares his parents by staying in His real Father’s house, and then he’s gone again. We call him Saint Joseph, but what did he really do?
By Scott Keith –
The other night, I took my children to see the new Marvel Comics movie, Dr. Strange. On the whole, it was not one of my favorite Marvel flicks. In fact, I was more struck by the young man sitting in front of me than I was by the movie. He was, I think, what you would call a “hipster.” He wore hiking boots with rolled up jeans, a buttoned up wool flannel shirt, and a beanie positioned above his ears with the pointy top rising off the top of his head. Frankly, he looked like a skinny lumberjack parading through the streets of San Juan Capistrano.
By Paul Koch –
“For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother…”
I had a t-shirt in college with that line on it. I had no idea that it was penned by Shakespeare. I didn’t know it was from the famous St Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V or that the actual battle of Agincourt in 1415 inspired the scene, but I knew, without a doubt, the truth of the words.
By Scott Keith –
My good friend David Rufner sent me an article recently that didn’t surprise me but did rile me up a bit. Written by David French, the article was in the National Review and titled “Young American males are losing touch with a critical element of true masculinity.” What grabbed me was the first few lines of the article. There, French says, “If you’re the average Millennial male, your dad is stronger than you are. In fact, you may not be stronger than the average Millennial female.”
By Scott Keith –
“As for myself, I judge the loss of all one’s possessions easier to bear than the loss of one faithful friend.” – Martin Luther
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” – C.S. Lewis
Last week on the Thinking Fellows podcast, Dr. Rosenbladt and I interviewed one of the hosts of Front Porch with the Fitzes, Pastor Joel Fitzpatrick, on the topic of masculinity. It was interesting to me how quickly our conversation turned from masculinity to the subject of male friendships. (Fodder for another show, I’m sure.) What has become evident to me over the past several years of research is that the two topics––masculinity and male friendships––cannot be separated.