Raising Real Men

Melanie has a recurring dream that she is back in college, final exams are approaching, and suddenly she realizes with horror that she’s been signed up for a class that she’s forgotten to attend all semester. Thankfully, that never actually happened to her, but that kind of panic feels pretty familiar sometimes. We’ve had a…
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At an old English parsonage down by the sea, there came in the twilight a message to me. Its quaint Saxon legend deeply engraven that, as it seems to me, teaching from heaven. And all through the hours the quiet words ring, like a low inspiration, ‘Do the next thing.’

When we were working on our workshop on purity for boys, we were surprised at some of the research we found that says that the average age of first (and hopefully only!) marriage has gone up drastically in the last generation. For men, the median age has gone up from 22 or 23 to 28…
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When you grow up in the Carolinas, you get used to thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches. They’re so commonplace, most people seem to ignore them until the wind actually picks up and sirens blow. The National Weather Service is testing new messages (like,“You could be killed”), but I’m not waiting for the NWS. A couple of videos…
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There are few disasters as riveting as a shipwreck. Thankfully they are very, very rare these days. This weekend was one of the exceptions, as the cruise ship Costa Concordia struck a reef off the coast of Italy and sank in shallow water near Isla di Giglio. It’s too soon to know the full story…
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“To his son Custis, a cadet at West Point, Lee once wrote: ‘Shake off those gloomy feelings. Drive them away. Fix your mind and pleasures upon what is before you. … All is bright if you will think it so. All is happy if you will make it so. Do not dream. It is too…
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Occasionally I open the news and think, “Have. We. Lost. Our. Minds?” This week, I read that the best way to show repect to a girl is to gouge her in the eye, slam her to the ground, and lay on top of her.  That’s what ESPN columnist Rick Reilly thinks. Joel Northrup is a…
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From time to time it’s helpful to ask, and try to answer, the question of just what is a “real man.”  I recently saw a book criticizing the commercialization of boyhood.  The cover artwork showed a hapless young man about ten or twelve years old.  He was wearing a football helmet, shoulder pads, and Superman…
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We’ve got a lot of veterans in our family, myself included, so we like to recognize them on Veterans’ Day.  Someone asked a question recently about this particular veteran, so I thought I’d share the story today in honor of intrepid young men doing their duty all over the world! We talk about Admiral David Farragut…
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Halloween is an English contraction of “All Hallow’s Eve”, or properly, the Eve of the Feast of All Saints … which is, after all, November 1.  In our house, it’s not a day of jack-o-lanterns and goblins, but a day to remember true heroism — a man who faced death and thereby opened the door…
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