[This originally appeared on the Mars Hill Church blog]

I was originally assigned the task of looking at advice on how to be a man from a men’s magazine. Problem is, there wasn't any.

Esquire's June/July 2010 issue was called How to Be a Man. Appropriate. With a title that declarative and a tagline of “Man at His Best,” I was anxious to comb through it to see what they had to say about manhood. With a base circulation of 700,000 and competition like GQ, Maxim, and Details, Esquire is arguably one of the largest and most influential men’s magazines in the world. They've got to know what they're talking about, right? Esquire’s website describes their audience as "the affluent and successful man." Should be exactly what I'm shooting for here.

With Irony As Our Guide

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In the same way you can learn about what someone values by what they buy, you can learn about a group by looking at what a store sells them.

URBN

Urban Outfitters has 130 stores in the US, Canada, and Europe. On January 31st, Urban Outfitters Inc. reported $1.94 Billion in annual revenue (nearly doubled in the last 4 years). Their website claims that their "established ability to understand our customers and connect with them on an emotional level is the reason for our success." They also claim to offer a "lifestyle-specific shopping experience for the educated, urban-minded individual in the 18 to 30 year-old range".

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[This article orginally appeared on The Resurgence]

He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. - Hanna Rosin

There has been significant attention in the media recently about changing roles between men and women; most notably in The Atlantic, Slate, and The New York Times (Interestingly each written by women). One of the major themes in this trend is the rise of two things: The Omega Male and women who don't need them.

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5 Good Minutes with: Mark Batterson  

The Humanitarian Jesus Interview Series  

Mark Batterson founded and pastors National Community Church (NCC) in DC and authored three major books: Primal, Wild Goose Chase, and In a Pit with a Lion.  But I wanted to talk with him because his church meets in theaters across the city, operates a coffee house called Ebenezers (which happens to be next to the old row home that houses the church offices), and close to 70% of the congregation are single 20-something DC singles – almost half of which change every year.  Safe to say this is not your typical church.  Mark’s daily blogs are read that thousands more than attend the church and he sits within a block of Union Station, the SEC, and the Federal Courts building.  From that vantage point it is also safe to say that he might have a unique perspective on what is going on in the hearts and minds of Christians traditionally interested in social issues.  But NCC is not a cause driven church – and it stays that way on purpose.  We talked about it in his office…

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If atheism is true, and there is no God, then everything really is all about me, and what I want, and what I can get. “My will be done, not Yours.”

Put your finger on the pulse of modern culture: it throbs with “me, me, me.” Advertisements tell me: “Indulge yourself! You deserve it!” I can buy my lunch and my coffee made “my way.” I flip open a magazine, or browse the best-sellers, to find ten easy tips on how I can have what I want, right here, right now.  

Put one way, this is selfishness. But it’s spun as empowerment, self-actualization. We are told to follow our hearts, seek our deepest desires, do what feels good. Indeed, if atheism is true, there is no ultimate purpose to life, so we might as well go for self-indulgence, whether through hedonism or through constructing one’s own “meaning” in life.

I just read this article by Roberta Green Ahmanson, who is on my short list of personal heroes (these images show me interviewing her in March at IAM's Encounter 10). In it, she describes two types of culture:

The sociologist James Davison Hunter has argued that—from entertainment, sports, and literature to family customs, fashion, and architecture—we live in an increasingly thin culture. I think of a film of ice on a lake so fragile that it breaks at the slightest touch. What can sustain us through suffering, loss, aging, and death? There is nothing to catch us when we fall. Thick culture is, instead, like the ice you see in a Dutch Master’s painting of canals in winter. Skaters fly across ice formed by freezing temperatures, adding first one layer, then another and another. Sliced, it would be feet deep. It won’t break when we fall.

A thick culture, in other words, provides a foundation for the challenges of our lives: for building friendships, marriages, and commitments, for facing loss, suffering, and even death.

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In the next 30 seconds, a little boy or girl in Africa will die of malaria.[1] Other research tells us that nearly 1 billion people in the world are illiterate[2] and another 1.4 billion can’t get to clean water[3].  So, what would those stuck in poverty have to add to a discussion about education and what could they possibly teach those of us who not only have drinking water flowing from a faucet, but who also sleep free from mosquito nets, with the ability to read ourselves to sleep? Let me pose the question a different way: are there universal methods of education that transcend cultural and socioeconomic lines to the point that we can articulate a core set of principles that may guide educators around the world, thus forming an international set of ideals that blurs the lines of the literate and illiterate and transcends the borders of East and West, North and South?

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A business consultant once told me about 'crazymaking' cultures. She observed several corporations that posted their vision and mission on the wall, but it had little do with daily life in the company. People were rallied around things at the big sales meetings and management retreats that simply had nothing to do with the true day to day operations. What this leads to is a 'crazymaking' culture. Sometimes I feel like I am completely losing my mind as I listen to various 'pep rallies' around certain camps or issues. Maybe we live in a 'crazymaking' culture all the time?

Chesterton rescues me when he writes in his book The Everlasting Man that: "the sanity of the world was restored and the soul of man offered salvation by something which indeed satisfy the two warring tendencies of the past; which had never been satisfied in full and most certainly never satisfied together. It met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story...." 

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Check out this video my dad and I recently produced with ConversantLIfe.  I love doing TV and radio interviews, but there's something particularly special about partnering with my dad.  In this Livestream interview, we discuss apologetics and ministry today as well as take questions from a live online audience. There's some great content here.  Don't miss it, and pass it on!

 

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