Tag Archives: manhood

Your Starting Word is Everything, Jazz Hope, and Manhood

Yesterday, the socials were torn up with complaints about the Wordle word of the day. Wordle renews at midnight, and some people rush to solve it first. I usually play it in the middle day, and yesterday I happened to see the angst from other players ahead of time.

The word was parer. It’s not Merrium-Websters or Oxford, but it is the American Heritage. This is enough to inspire fulminating effusions of grief over how hard the game is or the loss of a win streak. It’s not even a real word, they say.

I did guess this word, perhaps because it’s one in another word game I play but perhaps because the perceived difficulty of a Wordle level depends on your starting word. You could go vowel heavy (audio, ideas, adieu) or consonant heavy (smart, plumb, track). You could attempt more common letters (scope, trace, broke).

I like word light (or sight, might, fight) because of the common letters. If H is eliminated, then CH and SH are too. If I is out, then AI, OI, EI are too.

But with a word like parer, if you approach it as PA_ER, then you can see the potential for angst. Is it paper, paver, pager? When you have a word like this, it’s good to attempt a word with three possible letters, like grave, so if all three out, you can attempt a fourth option, like the P if the R hadn’t been the answer.

I’m sure, as they say in the podcasts, nobody cares. Let’s move on.

Manhood: For the Church | Episode 177: Brant Hansen on The Men We Need. Here’s an enjoyable podcast ep. on a manhood book that may be more grounded than some of those you’ve heard about. Hansen, an “Avid Indoorsman,” appears to keep his advice within the bounds of Scripture and argue for flip-flops as a sign of failed masculinity.

True Crime: Nothing But the Night takes readers back to 1924, when two students at the University of Chicago, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, kidnapped a fourteen-year-old boy named Bobby Franks and callously killed him. When the crime came to trial, Leopold and Loeb were defended by the celebrity lawyer Clarence Darrow, whose passionate courtroom antics were read in newspapers and circulated like the latest radio drama.” (Get the book here)

Education: In the book Letters Along the Way, a young believer says he intends to go to Yale to help Christians gain academic respectability. The corresponding senior saint writes, “At the risk of sounding pedantic (though realizing I sometimes come across that way), I doubt very much that evangelicals are wise to pursue academic respectability. What we need is academic responsibility. There is a world of difference.”

Jazz: In the current issue of ByFaith (not yet online), there’s a conversation with jazz pianist William Edgar, who is also a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary. He says, “I used to be fairly pessimistic about the future of jazz, but then I listen to these guys like Jon Baptiste or the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, and it’s the real thing. . . . it’s the theme of my book, ‘from deep misery to inextinguishable joy.’ You can’t take a shortcut to the joy, because it becomes happiness instead. You also can’t swell in the sin without becoming morbid. Jazz is that journey that goes from one place to the others.”

You can listen to Jon Baptiste with friends in this recording from 2020.

Photo: Fire Department, Columbus, Indiana. 1977. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Why Can’t a Woman Be Like a Man?

I don’t intend to paint a target on my back by blogging on this subject, but by way of setting up this video for you, let me give you my summation of biblical manhood and womanhood. Many whole books have been written on this subject with ministries and study series to boot. You may know names of go-to people on this issue, and I don’t want to draw any fire from them or their tribal warriors. I just want to give a succinct summation of what I believe the Bible says about Christian men and women.

When people talk about biblical manhood or womanhood, they often want to know the distinctives, not what a biblically minded people look like, but what a distinctly biblical man or woman looks like. On these distinctives, the Bible says few little. Who of the two is to seek first the kingdom of God? Who is to build a house upon the rock and not the sand? Who is bear the fruit of the Spirit, walk as a child of light, and put on the whole armor of God? Both men and women should do this.

In short, both biblical men and biblical women should be maturing, faithful believers. That’s 90% of the subject in a few words. There’s a small handful of particulars to sort out in the remaining 10%, but in a context of mutual respect, these things should work out without much fuss.

But today, we have pastors composing lists on being a man that include inanities such as pulling your pants up and avoiding flip-flops. For many years, we’ve had teachers use the Bible’s instructions on wives being submissive to their husbands to say woman should submit to men in general, even to strangers on the street. That’s not biblical in the least.

Before I start ranting and committing the same sins I’m calling out, let me segue to this video, in which The Observer begins with comments on Galadriel’s presentation in the new Lord of the Rings series and continues with the essence of femininity and how feminists seem to hate it. She says the feminists are the ones asking why women can’t be more like men.

Disclaimer: The host, Galatea, isn’t defending biblical womanhood and gets profane at times, but the video’s amusing on the whole and her points are solid.

‘Right Tool for the Job,’ by Mark Goldblatt

Right Tool for the Job

The headphones jerked out of my ears, and I made a grab for them, which caused me to trip over my feet, fall onto my side, and shoot off the back of the treadmill, knocking over two young women in spandex outfits who’d been chatting behind me. As one witness said, it looked like I was picking up a six-ten spare.

Yes, I’m blogging through The Lord of the Rings, and I’ll be back with that momentarily. But my Facebook friend Mark Goldblatt announced a deal on his book Right Tool for the Job: A Memoir of Manly Concerns, and I figured it wouldn’t do me any serious harm to take a break between hobbits with a short, light book. I did, and it didn’t.

Right Tool for the Job is a collection of humorous essays, sort of an autobiography under strobe light. We begin with an awkward memory of Mark’s father taking him to a Turkish bath, and end with a meditation on giving up softball because your body’s just getting too old for the punishment. A recurring theme seems to be the unlimited indignities men’s bodies impose on them, with particular emphasis on sexual awkwardness, though all the stories aren’t about sex, and honestly, what else is a guy going to write about?

Author Goldblatt is Jewish, secular, and conservative. He’s also extremely funny. I laughed out loud more than once. I recommend The Right Tool for the Job, with cautions for mature themes. I especially recommend it to women, as an introduction to what’s laughingly known as male psychology.