Click here to read part one and part two.

Daron’s Recommendations

1. Michael Foster and Dominic Bnonn Tennant, It’s Good to be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity (Canon Press, 2022)

The snare of dabbling almost prevented me from reading this worthwhile book.  Ubiquitous in our culture, dabbling is the enemy of actual learning and it produces impotent men.  I heard Michael Foster speak at the 2021 Stronghold Conference and I’ve listened to a few dozen of his podcasts.  So yeah, I know what he is all about…on to the next thing.  Like a housefly that never fully commits to one spot, we flit and veer at the slightest distraction.  Admitting that I was on this trajectory with Foster, I sat down and read his book.

This is not a book about being a good husband nor does it directly instruct on fatherhood.  It is more fundamental–helping men to repair manhood from the sabotage of both feminization and self-idolizing tyranny.  Foster and Tennant call men to fulfill their telos (intended purpose): Biblical dominion.

God fashioned a patriarchal world where fathers rule.  But after the fall wicked patriarchs employ three strategies against men:  harness them to wicked ends, pacify them, or destroy them.

“Many men fail to become patriarchs–and many more fail to become good patriarchs, ruling well over the domains God has given them.  For many men, their authority is either taken away by those with power over them or twisted.  Either way, whoever controls the men controls the culture.”

The diagnosis continues:

“We are living in a world of fatherless males who don’t know how to rebuild the walls of society.  They have become clueless bastards.  They know how to build, explore, and conquer – in video games.  They must turn to YouTube to learn how to jumpstart a car, tie a half-Windsor knot, and do a push-up.  Social skills are even harder for them.  They scour the internet to learn how to stand up for themselves, make friends, and talk to women.  The knowledge that is normally transmitted from father to son has been lost.  They have to rediscover it for themselves.”

Following diagnosis, the next two chapters are titled “Masculinity is Very Good” and “Sex is Very Good”.  Why read further?  The sinister temptation to dabble creeps in:  these two chapter titles are all the fodder a man needs for puffing his chest in his own home. But disciplining ourselves, we press on.

After examining the Creation Mandate’s call to fruitfulness and sex as the engine of dominion, Foster and Tennant reveal why Satan hates sex.  In order to subvert the Creation Mandate, Satan turns the sexes against each other and then also assaults the division between the sexes.  He fosters war between the genders and war on the genders. 

Next, Foster and Tennant expound the centrality of worship, the importance and effectiveness of male leadership in the church, the twin ditches of gnosticism and materialism, and submission to a local church.  The latter topic ends with this pithy distillation:  “Find a church that will disciple you.  Submit yourself to it.  Grow up.”

It’s Good to be a Man turns increasingly practical in later chapters with help on building gravitas through duty and discussion of three virtues that enable our dominion duty:  wisdom, workmanship, and strength (“the ability to do work while bearing weight”).  The section on marriage and mission includes this rare insight: “Since a wife is a complement to your mission, she cannot be the mission itself.”  The implications of this are significant.

I recommend fathers read this book with their sons.  We need sons who know their general mission by age 10 and begin working toward a specific mission by their late teens.  Wives, buy this book for your man and read it first–you’ll likely find it compelling and even helpful.  It’s Good to be a Man would also serve well in a discussion group.  So don’t dabble in manhood.  Let’s be men, read this book, and get to work.

Gage’s Recommendations

1. Michael Warren Davis, After Christendom (Sophia, 2024).

The West no longer needs a reformation but a resurrection, for “Western Christendom committed suicide” (p. 167). So says Michael Warren Davis, public intellectual and editor of the American Conservative. Far from a statement of despair, Davis recognizes that this is not a problem for those who have faith in the God Who raises the dead. The key question then is this: Does the Church in the West have the resources–nay, the Spirit–necessary to raise the dead?

In order to answer that question, Davis turns to history. At the bookends of the work (chs. 1-2; p. 147ff), he reminds his fellow Westerners that, although Christendom fell in the East long before it fell in the West–1453 versus 1914, respectively, on Dairmaid MacCulloch’s account¹–the Western Church began a rapid descent toward secularization while the Eastern Church has exhibited a staying power (and has even flourished) centuries after losing Her cultural force and as successive cities of man rose and fell around Her. Meanwhile, the Western Church, across denominational and institutional devices, has overwhelmingly capitulated to the zeitgeist of the secular culture, which secularization only arose in the first place precisely because the Church abdicated Her priestly responsibilities after losing Her long-held magisterial power over Europe. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that “heresy and apostasy are thwarted not by polemics or apologists or inquisitions but by holiness” (p. 74).

Punctuated by piercing applications, the rest of Davis’s book is essentially an exploration and explanation of those spiritual goods contained in the Eastern Church. These spiritual goods or habits of being that, unlike the reactionary tendencies of the Western Church, have kept the East resilient and genuinely able to provide both a disruptive and compelling gospel witness.

At critical junctures in the book, we find at least three concepts from Eastern Christendom which Davis highlights which the Western Church must (re)learn if She is to bear a faithful and fruitful witness that keeps Her lamp lit in Her half of the Kingdom:

First, the acquisition of a thoroughly Christian mentality. Davis treats at length the East’s well-developed theology of the phronema, a Greek word that appears throughout the New Testament (cf. Rom. 8:6-7; 27; 1 Cor. 2:16; Phil. 2:5), basically translatable as mindset, outlook, or mentality. While the Western phronema, due to its “entitlement to power” (p. 36), is held in a constant tension between “Christ’s command to love our neighbor and Augustine’s command to change the times” (p. 53), the Eastern has long-practiced “the mindset of Christ” (Phil. 2:5-11)–namely, humble obedience in the pursuit of holiness by prayer, fasting, and almsgiving as prescribed by Christ our God in the Sermon on the Mount. We in the West must reorganize our priorities lest we receive our due reward: losing both our own soul and our world, as Jesus warned.

Second, the redirection of our anxiety. Due to what James calls our “double-mindedness”–literally, our schizophrenia, the tension we feel in the West between loyalty to Christ and culture–we are a deeply anxious people, which causes us to fight the “Culture War . . . for the control of the West.” This culture war is “a defensive war,” which even if it “springs from our noblest parts” ruins us because we begin to fear and hate our angry neighbors as enemies. From the East, we must learn “the way of the Gospel . . . that persecutors are to be loved, even pitied, rather than feared or scorned” (pp. 45-46). Moreover, building on Ephesians 6, Davis reminds us that “we only have one true enemy: the Devil. As for the rest, those who seem to be our enemies–progressives, secularists, whatever–they’re our brothers and, as Saint Paul says, the ‘slaves of sin,’” whom we must slay with our only weapon: love (p. 47). Anxiety is zeal misplaced, and the only thing that we should be zealously and (ironically) anxious to secure is our own inner peace; for, in an age of peacelessness, Davis says that to “acquire the Spirit of peace, and thousands around you will be saved” (p. 85).

Third, the cultivation of holy apathy. Apathy is, etymologically, the unwillingness to suffer. We are willing to suffer for those things that we love most. But as Davis reminds us, we are the heirs of the Crusading Spirit of the West, which is the willingness to suffer in order to impose suffering in exchange for power. We must instead cultivate the Eastern spirit of xenitia, a foreignness to current fads and trends, like Saint Augustine, who asked, “What does it matter under whose government a dying man lives?” (quoted on p. 125). The Light from the East does not call us, however, to simply apathy but holy apathy, to choose the “greater crusade”: war with the passions (p. 164), those sinful demands of our flesh which place under the suffering of our own fallen nature (cf. Rom. 6:12; Eph. 2:3; 1 Peter 1:14; 2:11; 4:2). For, “The only way Christians can ever rule the world is if we stop trying” (p. 165).

Ultimately, Michael Warren Davis reminds us that looking East will save the West from “the heresy of activism” (p. 46) and teach us to embrace the beauty of a well-ordered life, expressed in a community of generous justice, which will save the world (cf. pp. 83; 133).

Excerpts

“The pagan Left and the pagan Right both blame the other’s ‘side’ for sealing modernity’s soul. But more importantly: neither believes that Christianity possesses the necessary tools to heal that malaise. . . . The pagan Left rejects Christian morality. The pagan Right scorns their commitment to meekness, humility, and lovingkindness. . . . Eventually, both sides will concoct a loyalty test of their own. Both will demand their ‘pinch of incense’: some gesture, small or large, to prove that our final, ultimate loyalty is to the State, the Party, the Leader–not to Christ. . . . A ‘re-enchanted’ West Will not necessarily be a re-Christianized West. If anything, it will more likely lead to a more intense anti-Christianity–more intense because, in no small part, the West would be returning to the care of demons. . . . [Meanwhile] Satan will promote any [conspiracy] because they distract us from the ordinary praxis of Christianity, namely: prayer fasting, and almsgiving. . . . He doesn’t care if we stumble to the Left or the Right. He doesn’t care if we become materialists or magicians. Both suit his purposes nicely” (pp. 113-114).

“News media–whether it’s slick corporate fare, or a home-cooking blog–invariably stamps us with a worldly phronema. Whether we’re reading about the presidential primary or celebrity gossip, it makes no difference. By its nature, the news can deal only with the City of Man. It trains us to care about things that ultimately don’t matter. . . . What can our [digital technology] tell us, except what we already know: that the world is full of sin and suffering and death? . . . It divorces us from reality. It transforms us into devices like itself: amalgams of light and sound and stimuli, determined by the algorithms we’re fed by the programs we consume. Whe Christians complain about modern technology, they’re almost always talking about Internet porn . . . [which is] only a symptom of our greater malaise. . . . [By online debates] we become addicted to our own malice. This technology is a threat to Christian charity” (pp. 124-126).

2. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and Fredrick Beuchner, Godric (HarperOne, 1999).

The principal responsibility of any Chrisitan author is to shock a complacent people with the realities of sin and damnation. This is why much modernist literature (or art in general) can at times feel more Christian than “Christian literature.” But when the raw honesty of modernism, genuine Christian faith, and true artistic ability combine, as they did in Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) and Fredrick Beuchner (1926-2022), faithfully Christian literature flowers.

O’Connor, known to us as the queen of Southern Gothic literature, was the self-proclaimed Hilly-Billy Thomist, whose novels are shot through with comedic and unsettling grotesques. Beuchner, a name that may be less familiar to us, was a presbyterian minister and public theologian often described as the American C. S. Lewis, whose diverse collection of novels, essays, sermons, and memoirs left an indelible mark on American theology and letters.

In her first published novel Wise Blood, the main character Hazel Motes, a God-haunted misanthrope returning from war, determines to spend his life as a street preacher of antireligion, “The Holy Church of Christ without Christ,” as he calls it. Of course, while Motes clearly perceives the hypocrisy in others, which he attempts to expose and expel through vehement nihilism, he is ultimately unsuccessful in accomplishing his true goal–namely, shouting down his own guilt and confusion. When Motes finally realizes, through a series of dramatic encounters, that he will never escape his conscience, he takes extraordinary measures and spends the rest of his life as a tragic anchorite–blind, silent, and in a state of unending penance. Hazel, though ever able to spot the motes in others’ eyes (as his surname suggests) is never fully able to remove the log that impairs his own vision of God, himself, and others.

In much the same way, Beuchner’s Godric is a prose poem (written almost entirely in iambic pentameter!) about a title character who is an expert at self-imposed, self-disgusted exile. Prompted by his restless heart, the entire novel is taken up with the Confessions-like commentary of misadventures that carry him farther and farther away from the company and communion of souls. When he, like O’Connor’s Hazel Motes, makes a mid-life about-face to the God from Whom humanity runs paradoxically both from and toward at once, Godric expects to find peace and rest as a Cross-bering hermit at the farthest edge of existence–only to find that corruption is not an external reality from which one can ever finally flee. When Godric is finally offered the opportunity to join the communion of saints, the novel reaches its heart-breaking conclusion.

The impossibility of finding redemption in isolation, the humility required for submission to a visible communion, the necessity of confession for salvation–these themes are like a dash of cold (holy) water to the face for those of us in the age of digital redemption.

For those who have eyes to see, Wise Blood and Godric shows us the futility of both the “Holy Church of Christ without Christ” and the “Holy Christ without the Church.” Both works are a reminder that, when Providence pounces, forcing us to confront those parts of ourselves from which we have labored to distract ourselves and to hide from others, the wisest route is not to double down in isolating despair, laboring for salvation in silence, but to reach toward the visible community of grace, where true repentance and faith can be seen, shown, and strengthened.

Excerpts

Godric

“In winter when the snow and ice were fierce, we shook beneath our different roofs alone, and that's what Hell is like, I think. It's cold and shame and shaking. And worst of all, it's loneliness.”

“When friends speak overmuch of times gone by, often it's because they sense their present time is turning them from friends to strangers. Long before the moment came to say goodbye, I think, we said goodbye in other words and ways and silences. Then when the moment came for it at last, we didn't say it as should be said by friends. So now at last, dear Mouse, with many, many years between: goodbye.”

“That's five friends, [I had] one each for Jesu's wounds, and Godric bears their mark still on what's left of him as in their time they all bore his on them. What's friendship, when all's done, but the giving and taking of wounds?

Wise Blood

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.

Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?”

“There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin, and the way to avoid sin was to avoid people . . . He saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”

Gage Crowder is husband to Rachel and father to Kyper Evelyn. In addition to interning at TRC, he teaches secondary Bible, literature, and philosophy at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He holds degrees in biblical studies and English literature and received a fellowship from the Theopolis Institute. When he’s not teaching, you’ll find him writing, extolling the genius of T. S. Eliot, or enjoying the great laughter of the kingdom of Christ with family and friends.

Daron Drown and his wife Amy settled in Huntsville after an Air Force flying career.  They homeschooled their five daughters and have one younger adopted son.  Daron continues to work in aerospace and Amy serves in church and community along with two daughters still at home.  The Drowns love a kitchen full of friends, books by a winter fire, camping, hiking, table games, vigorous conversation, household projects, and opportunities to learn.

Footnotes

¹ Dairmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. (London, UK: Penguin Publishing, 2010), 1024-1030.