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 […]
Over the past two decades, an extremely aggressive and clamorous battle of Biblical scholars has occurred over the meaning of one word in I Timothy 2:12: the Greek word authentein, which is translated as “usurp authority” in the KJV, as “have authority” in the NIV, as “assume authority” in the TNIV, and as “domineer […]
Guess who recently said this: “Male chauvinism has been the major problem through much of history. For most cultures through most of history the most serious deviation from biblical standards regarding men and women has not been feminism, but harsh and oppressive male chauvinism. It still exists today, not only in some […]
Watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the latest Harry Potter movie just out, made me think about awkward teenage interaction between the sexes. As Potter devotees know, each book (and movie) is another sequential year in the life of Hogwarts, and in particular the lives of friends Harry, Ron, and Hermione. […]
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, […]
I’ve recently been called “sensitive” by a church person because of my understanding about gender equality. What? Me — sensitive? Brooding over this comment, however, made me realize there was something more here than the compliment that was intended.
Could it be that I have some great emotional insight into people’s […]
What’s so wrong with being a terror on wheels? There’s a certain “bad boy” image that is attractive to a lot of people. See How to be a Bad Boy and How Bush’s Bad-Boy Image Helps. What’s extremely odd is that women seem to fall for this type despite their verbal denials. […]
Well, I go off the church board next week, and I leave with mixed emotions. When they asked me to join it three years ago, I told them that church eldership was never anything I ever sought — in fact, was something I rather dreaded. They wanted me anyway. I suppose an organization […]