One of the first things I noticed many years ago about my in-laws was that they lived with strict roles. A gift had been given to this couple, a two-tiered plate with a handle and separating piece with threads on both ends and maybe a nut for the bottom. My mother-in-law-to-be opened the […]
I consulted a relative of mine, Dr. Sara Brandt, who is a registered Marriage and Family Therapist about whether she sees differences regarding divorce and happiness in egalitarian vs. hierarchical marriages. She claimed to not be an expert on the subject as she does not get many couples who have a hierarchical marriage due […]
I gather that there are disagreements in the egalitarian camp on whether true gender traits exist or are only socializations. On the one hand, society creates differences like boys play with toy trucks and not dolls and girls play dress-up and not fix-it-up. Everybody had better line up and adapt. On the […]
Ephesians 6:12 in the KJV reads: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Both the NIV and TNIV read: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the […]
Believers in Christian manhood and womanhood would like us all to believe that there is something about masculinity as it is lived out in America that is crucial to Christianity. What it means to be masculine, however, varies from culture to culture, and has no business being inserted into Christian theology. There are […]
Helping boys to open up about what they are feeling takes effort and education on the part of supervising adults. Step one is to recognize the early signs of masking feelings, such as bad grades, rowdy behavior, overly quiet behavior, verbal denials that anything is wrong when other behaviors say otherwise, drugs or alcohol, […]
Educators are becoming increasingly concerned about boys. Much attention has been given to girls recently and they are improving in their access to opportunities and are improving in math and science achievement. Boys, on the other hand, continue to lag in reading, their self-esteem is now more fragile than girls’ self-esteem, are twice […]
Thank you all you regular readers of my blog for your kind comments and encouragements. I’m sorry I’ve been not able to post much for the last few weeks, since I’ve been dealing with an increasingly difficult heart situation. Mid-November my heart murmur decided to take a turn for the worse and my […]
Not as many people know Frank Schaeffer as knew his father, Francis, the early Christian Right apologist, but he’s apparently well enough known in evangelical circles to get hate mail from them. I’ve been quite taken with two of his novels, Portofino, and Zermatt. They, along with Saving Grandma, are the ongoing saga […]
Fifteen years ago, Deborah Tannen wrote a bestseller about miscommunication between the sexes called, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. Four years earlier than that she had published That’s Not What I Meant: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Your Relations with Others, which also showed how people subconsciously miscommunicate, […]