2 corinthians on Masculinity

The following story by professor and author A. J. Swoboda is a vivid example of how shame works in our lives, often causing us to hide and run away from the pain and embarrassment: One of the greate...

In his excellent book, The Magnificent Story , James Bryan Smith shares a true story from Japanese culture that illustrates just how demanding strict disciplinarian fathers can be. The Japanese...

God became man that dehumanized men might become true men. We become true men in the community of the incarnate, the suffering and loving, the human God.

The Summer Before Junior High School was filled with anticipation. I was excited to leave elementary school behind me. Junior high sounded so robust and adult. And I felt ready—with one caveat. Physic...

Most of us live with the false narrative that strength is found in domination and control. But these are not the highest forms of power. God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9). The powe...

Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to li...

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was mean...

You can only build an effective Christian life when you have a “settled core”: an inner self “hidden with Christ” (Colossians 3:3). When you go to the gym or a Pilates class, your instructor might enc...

There is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experienc...

In this short excerpt written by the Christian Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas to his godson, he pontificates on the topic of courage: Usually courage is identified with dramatic and heroic acts. Though I...

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

Brett Favre was a driven man. He explained to USA Today that his father’s message that he was never good enough drove him to become one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history…His dad had also been hi...

Five fatherly responsibilities that God has assumed toward His children: 1. God provides for us (Phil. 4:19). 2. God protects (Mt. 10:29-31). 3. God encourages us (Psm. 10:17). 4. God comforts us (2 C...

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Speedy Morris is the basketball coach for LaSalle University. He was shaving when his wife told him he was wanted on the phone by Sports Illustrated. He got so excited over the prospect of national re...

Eternal God, lead me now out of the familiar setting of my doubts and fears, beyond my pride and my need to be secure into a strange and graceful ease with my true proportions and with yours; ...

Far too easily we settle for holiness rather than wholeness, conformity rather than authenticity, becoming spiritual rather than deeply human, fulfillment rather than transformation, and a journey tow...

Think of your own experiences as a human being: your body is not just a “shell” in which you dwell. Your body is not just a body. Your body is not just any body. Your body is somebody—you! Through the...

My friend Mike Metzger of the Clapham Institute once used the following example to demonstrate how important frames are if we are to make sense of reality’s puzzle. This may seem like a head scratcher...

Resilience is not something that can be mustered in a moment of “rising to the occasion.” It is formed over a long period before the crisis of testing so that it can continue the transformation during...

Where there’s humility there is majesty; where there’s weakness, there’s might; where there is death, there’s life. If you want to get these things don’t disdain those.

James Stockdale and what is now known as the Stockdale Paradox comes from his experience as a prisoner of war for seven years during the Vietnam War. The Stockdale Paradox, made famous in Jim Collins’...

Fear and growth go together like macaroni and cheese. It’s a package deal. The decision to grow always involves a choice between risk and comfort. This means that to be a follower of Jesus you must re...

Insecurity is a funny thing. It makes us into someone we’re not as a way to cope with someone we used to be. For me, it started at home. Growing up, my dad had been critical of my mother’s weight, and...

Christians are often accused of two wrong-headed views of the body. One is that we ignore the body in favor of a disembodied, spirits-floating-on-clouds spirituality. The other is that we are obsessed...

In their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...

But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin...

For these attacks do not contribute to make us frail but rather show us to be what we are.

To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the i...

My kids love the movie Remember the Titans . It’s the story of the integration of the TC WIlliams High School Football Team in Alexandria, Virginia, in the 1960s Civil Rights era. The white players a...