Raising Real Men

John and Betty Stam were young American missionaries to China when Communist forces took over their town.  Tim Challies re-tells  the gripping story of what happened to John, Betty, and their infant daughter Helen, the testimony they bore, and the impact it had on the Chinese and Christians around the world.  The title above was…
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John Newton, the converted former slave trader who became pastor to English abolitionist William Wilberforce, has a supporting role in the film Amazing Grace — besides, obviously, writing the theme song (in a sense).  His own story is just as fascinating, and even more dramatic, than Wilberforce’s. I just finished re-reading Newton’s autobiography, reprinted as Out…
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We just love Thanksgiving! What a wonderful holiday! Leading up to the day, we teach our children great hymns of Thanksgiving, such as “We Gather Together,”  “Come Ye Thankful People, Come,”  “Count Your Blessings,” and “Now Thank We All Our God.” We particularly love “We Gather Together,” because it was a Dutch song of the proper…
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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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Fernando Espinosa, 17, of El Paso, Texas, is receiving the Boy Scouts’ Honor Medal with Crossed Palms, its highest award for bravery and service.  Espinosa was walking a teacher to her car earlier this year when another vehicle bore down on them in the crosswalk.  He managed to push the teacher to safety but was…
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This week’s episode from Hero Tales is the remarkable story of how George Rogers Clark and a few dozen backwoodsmen captured the Northwest Territory from the British during the Revolutionary War.  Theodore Roosevelt relates how Clark led his men through the icy floodwaters of the Wabash River to surprise the British outpost of Vincennes, among…
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One of my favorite Founders is George Washington. There’s a whole mythology that sprung up around him, sure, but the reality is just as fascinating and more edifying. Two excellent biographies I’ve enjoyed are Joseph P. Ellis’ His Excellency, George Washington and Richard Brookhiser’s Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington.  He really was a man of strong…
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One thing we hear all the time is how hard it is to get boys to “sit down and do schoolwork” and when I look back at the most effective learning we’ve done, it’s been when it was hands-on, hearts-on education. Such as when we toured Civil War sites in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania on…
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The Knoxville News-Sentinel reports that the last surviving German machine gun captured by Sgt. Alvin York in World War I has been discovered in the attic of a Massachusetts public library. …York pulled off one of the great feats of any combat soldier of any time. He single-handedly annihilated a German machine gun battalion on Oct….
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