Al's 3rd talk

Here is the final talk that Al gave in his 3 part series on manhood. It was given on April 8th.
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Manhood 3 Outline:  Jesus is da man, da last adam,

Summarize last week:  Manhood in world cultures, neurobiology, and our own American experience.

1. The Current Cultural Confusion:

1. Robert Brannon’s, Forty Nine Percent Majority (1976)

1. No Sissy Stuff
2. I’m the Big Wheel
3. I am the Rock
4. I give ‘em hell

2. Promisekeepers in 2006 listed men’s problems as:

1. friendlessness,
2. emotional isolation,
3. confusion about masculinity,
4. success-driven,
5. spiritually searching.

BUT ARE WE MEN IN CHRIST OR JUST MEN IN AMERICA?

2. Man is made to Image God: Male & Female

1. Who is God & Why Matter, Matters?

1. The Invisible God is made visible through what he has made.  
2. Transcendent- sky god,
3. Immanent- mother earth,

2. Jesus is the Image of God
3. What is the Image of God?

1. Substantial View

1. Immortal soul
2. Embodied self

2. Functional View- God’s representative over and in creation
3. Relational View- best seen in our sexuality but “I-Thou” in relation to God.  

3. The Image of God is sexed, differentiated between male and female

1. Equality and Difference are willed by God
2. Adam before Eve is not wild but responsible

1. Wilderness or Garden origins?
2. We Can Work It Out- cultivate, subdue, progress, compete, challenge, grow, acquire, aggressive
3. We Can Keep It Safe- protect, sustain, guard, communicate, use strength to defend. Adam fails to tell Eve about danger.

4. A Real Man is a Godly Man, A Real Man is a Disciple of Christ

1. Men in Christ are

1. Transcendental
2. Procreative
3. Protective
4. Providing
5. Sacrificial
6. Nurturing

Are the spiritual gifts or fruit of the Spirit gender specific? Emotional mastery, responsibility, love, joy, peace, kindness, gentleness, helps, tongues, prophecy, word of wisdom, word of knowledge, teaching, administration, liberality.

5. Being Men in a Changing Culture

1. Wuthnow’s After the Baby Boomers, 2007: Seven Key Trends in Changing World of Young Adults

1. Delayed marriage
2. Children are fewer and coming later
3. Uncertainty of work and economy
4. Increased higher education for many
5. Loosening relationships. Younger adults have fewer social relationships than their parents and grandparents did. They are bowling alone rather than in leagues.
6. Globalization exposes us to instant information, job changes, more travel, increased emigration and immigration.
7. Information explosion, Internet and computer revolution at home, school,  workplace, entertainment, study

2. Smith’s Young Catholic America, 2014, Seven Macro Changes in American Culture for Emerging Adults

1. Growth of higher education. Remaining in school until their 30s
2. Delay of marriage over fifty years period: Women from 20 to 26; Men from 23 to 28.
3. Changes in American and global economy undermine life-long careers and employment security.
4. Parents willing to extend financial aid through the 20s.
5. Widespread availability of many different contraceptives, especially the Pill. Sexual intercourse disconnected from fertility and parenthood.
6. Postmodern thought dismisses reason, progress, science, universal rationality, patriotism and objective truth.
7. Consumerism as a way of life. Material prosperity as result of post WWII economic boom. Increased sense of entitlement and extravagant expectations.

6. Some Questions

1. Men discover dominion through service. Some call this servant lordship. What responsibilities has God given you and what authority has He placed into your hands to carry out these tasks? Are there any future responsibilities for which you should be preparing now?
2. If someone were to ask four people who know you well, where you most need spiritual growth and development. What would they say?
3. Can you name any good friends? Men who you can confess your sins too? Men who you can borrow money from? Men who will challenge and confront you as well as laugh and cry with you?  What are some barriers that keep Christian men from being present in the lives of friends? Can you think of some steps that will enable you to have a greater presence in the lives of male friends and to allow them to be more present in your life?
4. Have you ever struggled with envy toward other men? How is it futile and counterproductive. What is the difference between envy and godly ambition?
5. Have you experienced the joy of doing the will of God? When? Have you described this to another man? Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before him. When have you consciously experienced joy in suffering? Have you shared that with another man?
6. Men procreate, protect, and provide. They cultivate, guard, nurture, sacrifice. In what ways does the image of Jesus, ‘lowly and meek’, keep you from godly ambition, fruitful competition, and pursuit of blessedness as well as blessing? Is it manly to demonstrate these activities?
7. When have you imagined you were being “manly” only to find out you were playing the jackass? How did you respond? Shame, embarrassment, fury, threatening, laughter, self parody, indifference? If you had it to do over again what would you do?

The above questions are rewritten from a list I discovered in my notes. I cannot, however, locate the name of the book.

7. A Conclusion: Is there a crisis of manhood? Yes and no. From Eden to Ann Arbor to Jesus’ return, there is always only one fundamental crisis. It isn’t a crisis of manhood. It is a crisis of obeying God, a crisis of discipleship, a crisis of the will of God, a crisis about the manifestation of the Kingdom. Wherever the will of God is performed, there is a glimpse of the Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Man or woman, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, pious or rebellious, old or young, beautiful or ugly, black or white, immigrant or native, labor or management, etc., - if anyone wants to see the Kingdom obey the will of God.  Build the Church on the will of God and the world will rediscover the Church as a window on eternity.

Al Kresta's 2nd Talk on Manhood

Manhood 2 Outline

Here is an outline of April 1, 2014’s thoughts on manhood. When we get together for our third meeting on April 8, we will finally focus on manhood IN CHRIST. This outline for April 1, however, describes manhood as we learned about from brain physiology and the neurosciences, cultural anthropology around the world and from our own lived experience in American society.

1. There does seem to be a “War on Men”

1. Hollywood and the prestige media-

• Fathers in sitcoms. Any good dads who are more than merely loveable dolts? Since 1970 only Brady Bunch and Cosby Show come to mind. Where are the strong, responsible, intelligent, generous models?
• You come in “fourth”, we don’t need to “fiddle” with men anymore, “why don’t they just go away?”, “Why keep them around? For ornament!”, “men are in retreat in this woman’s world.”, “There is nothing objectively essential about his contribution.”

2. Consider book titles like The War on Men, The End of Men and the Rise of Women, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Turns Men Into Boys, Are Men Necessary? What is a Man?
3. The Kinsey/Hefner/Pill sexual revolution and, later, ideological feminism’s call for “liberation” from home and traditional female sexual restraint satisfied libertine men but left men confused about their role vis a vis women. Women now had “a lot more important things on their horizon” (Hanna Rosin, “Sexual Freedom and women’s Success”, Wall Street Journal 3/23/12).
4. But neither women nor men are happy. “As women have gained more freedom, more education, and more power, they have become less happy” (Nancy Gibbs, “What Women Want Now”, Time, 10/14/09). Men, 18-34, claiming a successful marriage is one of the most important things in life has dropped from 35% to 29% in ten years. Women, on the other hand, rose from 28% to 37%.

2. Are you a man? (Lady MacBeth to her husband, Macbeth). What is masculinity? Are men everywhere alike in their concern for being “manly”? If so, why?

1. Neuroscience & Comparative Brain Studies

1. Gender neutrality is a myth. For thirty years from the 1960s until the 1990s, academics like Dr. John Money, Johns Hopkins University, claimed that a boy could be raised as a girl if the nurturing was strong enough. Nurture trumped nature. He was tragically wrong. See the film Dr. Money and the Boy With No Penis or read See Weekly Standard review of As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto, 2008.  http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/011/136eioki.asp
2. Parents raise girls and boys differently because girls and boys are so different from birth. There are significant brain differences from birth and through maturation.

1. At 18 months, children still cannot reliably assign themselves a to the correct gender. Lisa Serbin, Concordia University, in a study of 77 toddlers, girls and boys, found that children’s toy preferences are firmly in place by this age. Boys go for trucks; girls for dolls.
2. Boys and girls see the world differently. Girls make more elaborate and precise color sensitive distinctions. They also navigate using landmarks that can be seen, heard or smelled. Boys rely on absolute directions (north, south, etc) or absolute distances (2 miles, 3 city blocks).
3. Boys and girls process and describe emotions differently
4. Boys are more risk-taking; girls more risk averse.  Boys tend to overestimate what they can achieve. Almost all drowning victims are male.
5. Boys and girls assign different meanings to aggression.  Consider boys trashing each other in a locker room or fighting as a prelude to friendship. Robin Hood & Little John, King Arthur and Lancelot. Compare Anne Shirley’s response to Gilbert calling her “Carrots” and pulling her pigtails.

Girls and boys play differently. They fight differently. They learn differently. They see the world differently. They handle negative emotions differently.

2. Crosscultural studies on masculinity. Real manhood is different from simple anatomical maleness. It is not a natural condition that comes about spontaneously through biological maturation but is a precarious or artificial state that boys must win against powerful odds. This is true among peasants and urbanized peoples, hunters and fishermen, on all continents and environments. It is found among warrior  peoples and those who have never killed in anger.

1. See David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 12ff.
2. Williams and Best, Measuring Sex Stereotypes: A Thirty-Nation Study, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1982 conclude that there is “substantial similarity” to be found “panculturally in the traits ascribed to men and women.”
3. When we look over the globe, three elements defining manhood are ubiquitous. These put men at risk on the battlefield, in the hunt and in confrontation and competition with their fellows.

1. Man is an impregnator of women.
2. Man is a protector of women and children.
3. Man is a provider for kith and kin.

4. For a male to become a man impregnator-protector-provider takes training. Older men turn boys into men whether among the Masai or in 19th century England.  Consider the chartered purpose of the Boys Scouts. Scouting’s purpose is to “make big men of little boys” by fostering “an independent manhood” as though this cannot be expected from nature alone.
5. Even in late 19th and early 20th century Anglo-American Christianity there was a call for a “muscular Christianity”. This was one reason Eric Liddell (Chariots of Fire, 1981. Must see movie) competed in the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris.  In America, advertising executive Bruce Barton publishes The Man Nobody Knows which presents a strong, muscular Jesus who worked with his hands, slept outdoors, and travelled on foot. Jesus was “the world’s greatest business executive..The Founder of Modern Business” who created a world conquering corporation with a group of twelve hand-picked protégés from the bottom ranks of the business world.  

Was Jesus really a glorified Rotarian? Next week we focus on Manhood in Christ.

In response to the question what does our American society prize as masculine traits?, you listed conqueror, protector, strong and sensitive, lots of sexual partners, offering wisdom, successful, achieving, high status, confident, man of his word, integrity, responsibility, gentleman, lots of money, dignity, aggressive, physically strong, competitive, driving a Ford F-150, leadership. John Kopinski offered None of the Above and what followed was an acknowledgement of a pocket of society that sees the New Man as a hipster, going with the flow, artsy, beatnicky.  When asked who is the No Man answers were coward, wimp, double-crosser.

                         

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Al Kresta's First Talk on Manhood

Here is an outline of Tuesday’s thoughts on Manhood. When we next get together, we will contrast and compare “manhood” or “masculinity” as held by God, the world, the flesh and the devil. Is a man’s man a godly man? How does the “New Man” in Christ differ from distortions like “machismo”, “authoritarian”, “bohemian”, “consumerist”, or “libertine” man? Only when we first identify what God intended when he created humanity, male and female, can we discern how the Fall and sin distorted that original intention. Then we can discover how the Last Adam, Jesus, recreates the human- “male and female” and redeems us beyond God’s original creative purpose.  Clue: The last Adam is superior to the first Adam. Grace perfects nature. “’The first man, Adam, became a living being,’ the last Adam a life-giving spirit” (1 Cor 15:45).  

1. What “crisis of manhood”?

1. Society: Modern society tries to keep us in a perpetual state of arousal. Just consider how many “breaking news alerts” CNN, Fox and MSNBC issue daily.  Media loves a “crisis”.
2. Individual persons: We, too, have learned to manufacture “crises” to enhance our own personal dramas. We all know “drama queens”. Who wants to be known merely as a respectable worker of the soil when he can be renown as a slayer of dragons?
3. Do we just have short memories and are easily duped about new “crises”? Remember all the attention heaped on tennis star, transgendered Renee Richards. LGBT stuff is not really a “new” crisis. Remember the splash created by Stephen Clark’s Man and Woman in Christ? When was that? Steve addressed this “crisis” 35  years ago. Do crises last that long?  17th century Puritan preachers in New England warned of a crisis of declining womanly morals. The occasion was a rash of bare ankles dangling under the pews and distracting the brothers from worship.
4. Besides society does maintain an ideal of a non-feminized “civilized man”. Consider Adam Levine, tough divorced kid, overcomes failure, Maroon 5 rock artist, multiple Grammys plus, successful capitalist  entrepreneur in men’s attire, colognes, recording studios, a model of health and wellness, People mag’s sexiest man alive, well groomed, coaches those less gifted. Earnings of 35 million in 2013. Tough and tender, right off pages of Esquire or GQ as well as Rolling Stone or Forbes.  Does anybody really think he is “feminized” or “unmanly”?

WHETHER THERE IS A CRISIS OR NOT, THERE IS A PERPETUAL RESPONSIBILITY THAT MEN TRAIN BOYS TO BECOME MEN. AS FAR BACK AS PLATO THE TWO MOST URGENT PHILOSPHICAL QUESTIONS WERE: WHO TEACHES THE CHILDREN? & WHAT ARE THEY TAUGHT?

THE FACT THAT MANHOOD MUST BE TAUGHT AND DOESN’T JUST COME WITH BEING A MALE MEANS WE MUST DISTINGUISH BETWEEN SEX AND GENDER.

2. Is there really a difference between sex and gender?

1. Sex refers to biology and physiology. Terms are “male” and “female”. Sexual designation resides between the legs.

Gender, on the other hand, refers to how a given society defines “manhood” or “womanhood”. What roles, attributes, attitudes, behaviors, aspirations are proper to and constitute a real “man” or “woman”?

2. There is an entire academic industry and new discipline called “Gender Studies” that can be a big target for mockery. The more lawyers the more laws and law suits. The more gender studies profs the more we seem to multiply genders like Heniz’ varieties of ketchup. For instance, Facebook now gives options of users to declare 56 different genders or the university instructor who told his students that he and his wife had decided after careful thought to not assign a gender to their infant believing that it could choose for itself when it gains social experience.
3. In spite of some silliness, there really is a distinction everyone makes between sex and gender. Adolescent boys know they all have testicles but only a few are reputed to “have balls.” This is the distinction, crude as it is, between sex and gender.  Jews distinguish between a regular male and a real mensch.  To be male doesn’t make you manly. Maleness is chromosomal, manliness is acquired.
4. If we fail to honor this distinction between sex and gender, we will find ourselves claiming that certain gender roles and behaviors are divinely required of a male or female, when, in fact, they are only prescribed by culture or society. Back in the early 70s the argument over whether Scripture addressed the question of whether or not a serious Christian woman and mother should be employed outside the home. Four sides quickly came up among friends of mine:

1. It is ungodly.
2. It is imprudent if children are involved.
3. It is a matter of indifference and mere personal preference.
4. It is a moral obligation in this new era for women to make their way in the career world in order to prove their equality and competence with men.

Sociologists of religion note that serious “religious” people have a  tendency to “sacralize” the status quo and “baptize” existing social and cultural arrangements as divinely given.  We must distinguish between “traditions of men” warned against by Jesus and Paul and those traditions which flow from the gospel or “sanctified” reason.

3. Modern American culture erects many barriers to the flourishing of manhood: Absence of fruitful work, fathers and faith.

1. Nearly 20% of American men no longer seek daily work. What do they do with the idle time? History shows that when men don’t work they develop unhealthy ways of affirming their “masculinity”. E.g., Fight Club syndrome arises when groups of young men are underfathered and underemployed. “I’m a 30 year old boy. I knew my dad for about six years, but I don’t remember anything…What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.
2. Walter Russell Mead: “What a surprise! We raised a generation of bright kids without a foundation in religion, and they’ve grown up and gone to Wall Street.” In fact, consider the movie Wall Street. “Greed is good” Gordon Gecko mentors young Bud Fox who is alienated from his hardworking union leader father. When Gecko tries to get Bud to use his father to raid the union’s pension fund, Fox sees his dad’s fidelity to faithful manhood and fulfilling promises. He undergoes a moral conversion.
3. We have come to despise the code of the man as an arbitrary social imposition. The “code” is composed of basic moral obligations that characterize the mature man. We find this code in many places the Ten Commandments, the Boy Scout oath, the example of a virtuous grandfather, the Navy Seal Code. Immature boys, however, want autonomy rather than conformity to truth. Freedom without responsibility or relationship has become an ideal: “the unencumbered self”.

4. Can we locate this “crisis” of manhood in our own interior struggle, our immediate and extended family, the workplace, the society at large? Later we will focus on the Church. The problem becomes more acute and consequential in the Church. This is because the Church is not just a “club” for us to experience fellowship, acceptance, love, consolation. It is the “city upon a hill”, the new nation, the royal priesthood, the chosen people. It is the community that stands as a witness to the coming kingdom. If the Church fails to bear witness the world is left without the normal out-picturing of the reality of Christ’s body. Here are a few places you found the problem of manhood in your experience. I may have missed one or two.

1. In the way decision-making often takes place. The fear of standing alone and leading in decision-making preferring the safety and security of consensus.
2. In the way men isolate themselves from others so there is no accountability or the challenge, even conflict that comes from having strong male friendships. Iron sharpens iron.
3. The way that the isolated man can surround himself with perpetual entertainment and electronic digital stimulation.
4. The fear of being wrong
5. The confusion over feminist expectations.
6. The hypocrisy of a culture that claims openness and tolerance but immediately marginalizes the man who will disagree about the morality of homosexual acts.
7. This is especially acute among youth where not merely acceptance but approval and even applause for homosexuality has become a new orthodoxy. Buck it at your own social risk.
8. The failure of fathers to stand firm in discipline and make hard decisions. The unwillingness to inflict necessary pain just as a surgeon must.