Tag Archives: Men

Mentoring

The Pugnacious Irishman invites Christians to defend their faith

9 Comments

His post is boldly entitled “Walking Around with our Pants Around our Ankles”.

A little bit about Rich: his background is in teaching and his most recent post was in a school in a very rough part of Los Angeles.

Rich makes an important point about the need to find people who disagree with you and engage them. You won’t find them in your house or in your church. You’ve got to go to the workplace or the university campus and start making friends with them to find out what they believe and whether they are open to new ideas!

Rich reacts to my post from yesterday here:

…Another thing is that when people are caught in an environment where they have to defend God’s honor, they suddenly become starved for the kind of training Wintery advocates.  If you regularly find yourself amidst a bunch of atheists, agnostics, and Muslims who are constantly challenging you on the reasonableness of your faith, chances are, you’ll start searching for answers pretty quickly.  Hey, it happened to me. In other words, if your pants fall down, buying a belt suddenly moves up a few notches on your priority list.

The kicker is that many people never experience that felt need; they are sequestered in an environment of comfort.  A decent number go to great lengths to maintain this bubble, avoiding being exposed.  They are walking around in closeted quarters, with the shutters drawn and drapes pulled down, oblivious to the fact that their trousers are hanging around their ankles.

Many people assume apologetics is all about merely “winning an argument,” but nothing could be further from the truth.  WK puts it in the proper perspective: it’s about defending God’s honor in public.  If someone were clowning on your spouse at work, wouldn’t you want to stand up and say something?

That’s the first key point about apologetics: protecting God’s reputation as a way of participating in a friendship with God. He’s also got some book recommendations in his post for beginnners and I could not agree more. I own every stinking one of them!

And he’s got an update here, where he makes the second key point about apologetics.

Excerpt:

Addition to today’s post:  I don’t think I underscored enough another motivation of apologetics–love.

Why defend the faith?  Because we love our neighbors.

This is a good point for Christians who value love. Apologetics is love. It’s one way that you can love your neighbor. God expects us all to spend some time responding to his overtures to us in nature, in conscience, and in history. It does no good to help atheists to ignore God’s calling by keeping silent about God’s will for that person.

Commentary

New research paper highlights the importance of fathers

1 Comment

Story here on Florida International University’s web site:

Who did the research:

FIU’s Fatherhood Lab explores these issues and Psychology Professor Gordon Finley, who runs the lab, focuses specifically on how divorce impacts fathers and the development of their children. Finley has found that a father’s role is unique and far too often neglected by the family court system.

What did they find:

Using questionnaires and a retrospective technique in which he asked 1,989 young adults to think back on their relationship with their fathers, Finley found that children of divorce really miss their fathers. According to Finley, they are denied a relationship with them because of present-day family law and court practices.

“Divorce marginalizes or severs a father’s relationship with his child,” he says. “In reality, the father becomes a visitor in his or her life. He is no longer a father in the very literal sense.”

Recently,  I blogged about why social conservatives should be fiscal conservatives.

But you fiscal conservative readers – shouldn’t you be social conservatives, too?

The statistics are alarming: children from fatherless homes account for 63 percent of youth suicides, 85 percent of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders and 71 percent of all high school dropouts. And 37 percent of fathers have no access or visitation rights to their children.

Read the whole thing, especially if you don’t usually care about social conservatism. It matters. The family is a bulwark against state power, and is the first thing to go as socialism progresses into fascism

More on this topic later in the week

Further study

Recently, I blogged about how government intrudes into the family and about the myth of “dead-beat Dads”. And about how the feminist state’s discrimination against male teachers is negatively impacting young men. And there is my series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage: Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.

News

American university gender gap: 57% female, 43% male

6 Comments

Story here in the Gainesville Sun.(H/T Why Boys Fail)

They focus mostly on the gender gaps in Florida universities, but I think these schools reflect the national situation. Boys are falling behind girls in schools, and in life.

Excerpt:

Women make up 57 percent of college enrollment nationally, according to the most recent federal statistics. In Florida, five of the 11 state universities have female enrollments topping 60 percent.

…Graduation rates support the thought. More than 63 percent of women graduate from UF in four years, compared with 42 percent of men.

I agree with this statement from Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education:

He calls for changing the way in which boys are educated. Boys learn through a more active, hands-on learning style than girls, he said. Mischief-making boys are treated as criminals or sent to special education classes, he said.

“Boys aren’t allowed to be boys today,” he said. “They’re treated as defective girls.”

Does anyone care enough to ask men why they are not motivated? Are there proper schools, teachers and incentives in place to prod men towards responsible manhood?