Boys: A Rescue Plan.

Boys, A Rescue Plan: Moving Beyond the Politics of Masculinity to Healthy Male Development, by Michael Gurian and Sean Kullman, with a foreword by Warren Farrell.

This is one of the most practical and hopeful books yet written on the challenges facing boys. Rather than dwelling on blame or ideological conflict, the authors ask a simple question: What do Boys really need to thrive ?  Their answer is grounded in decades of research, clinical experience, education, neuroscience, and child development.

The book paints an honest picture of declining educational outcomes, rising mental health struggles, fatherlessness, excessive screen time, reduced physical activity, and a growing lack of purpose among many boys. But its greatest strength is that it refuses to stop at diagnosis. Instead, it offers a genuine rescue plan.

Gurian and Kullman advocate practical, evidence-informed reforms: stronger support for fathers and families; developmentally appropriate schooling; more male teachers and mentors; healthy rites of passage; purposeful physical activity; better mental health care tailored to boys; responsible technology use; and communities that celebrate positive masculinity rather than viewing it with suspicion. They argue that boys flourish when surrounded by caring adults who combine high expectations with empathy, structure, and encouragement.

The tone is constructive throughout. Rather than framing boys' wellbeing as competing with girls' progress, the authors show that investing in healthy male development strengthens families, schools, workplaces, and society as a whole...

At a time when public debate often becomes polarised, Boys, A Rescue Plan stands out as a compassionate, evidence-based roadmap for action. It reminds us that boys aren't problems to be managed, but are beautiful young people with immense potential waiting to be nurtured. Every parent, teacher, policymaker, and community leader concerned about the next generation should read this thoughtful and solution-focused book...

Buy it here: https://www.amazon.com.au/Boys-Rescue-Plan-Masculinity-Development/dp/B0DRP8B74K

( Gladly brought to You by Digital Anvil)

Need for You. [Unpopular Notion!]

Need for You:

It’s tempting to think we’re strong, we’re capable, and “we’ve got this.” But in reality, we are powerless on our own. We desperately need God—every moment of every day.

We wouldn’t be here if He didn’t create us. We wouldn’t live if He didn’t sustain us. We wouldn’t flourish if He didn’t guide, protect, and empower us. 

The author of 1 Chronicles knew the importance of depending on God. He said:

“Seek the Lord and his strength; seek his presence continually!”

‭‭1 Chronicles‬ ‭16‬:‭11‬ ‭ESV‬‬

In a world that’s constantly focused on itself, it’s crucial to recognize our need to depend on God. We need His strength, we need His power, and—to put it simply—we just need Him! 

If you’re feeling confident in your own self-sufficiency, ask yourself: Who made this world? Who created my body, my mind, and my soul? My eyes, my legs, my lungs? Who has the power to save—or to destroy? Who holds the keys to life?

Just as we continually need air, we need the power and presence of God to sustain our every move. 

So how can we seek His strength and presence continually? By staying connected to Him: talking to Him throughout the day, prioritizing Him in the midst of busy schedules, humbly asking for His power. 

God will never deny a heart that is genuinely seeking Him. 

So come to Him with your weakness and He will give you strength. Come to Him with your questions, your needs, and your wants, and He will give you Himself. And that is the very best thing of all. 

Repost from Digital Anvil.

One Intellectual's Admission 
 

 But what is truly stunning is that, with some intellectuals, there is no need to pursue any inquiry because they make no bones about what they are doing. They candidly admit that truth is not their guiding consideration at all.

 

 One of the most frank is Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World.

Huxley’s later book of essays, Ends and Means, is “an inquiry into the nature of ideals,” and in the course of it he is candid about his own beliefs. “All that we are,” he repeats twice, “is the result of what we have thought,” so it is important for us to think well, to be clear about how we think, and to choose the best worldview. 

 

 

“It is impossible to live without a metaphysic. The choice that is given us is not between some kind of metaphysic and no metaphysic; it is always between a good metaphysic and a bad metaphysic.” And how are we to decide? By observing the one that is closest to reality, and may be considered true.

Yet “no philosophy is completely disinterested,” Huxley argues. “The pure love of truth is always mingled to some extent with the need, consciously or unconsciously by even the noblest and most intelligent philosophers, to justify a given form of personal or social behavior, to rationalize the traditional prejudices of a given class or community.” Everyone, he claims, thinks for both “intellectual reasons” (based on truth) and “voluntary reasons” (based on desires and the will).

Huxley was a deeply thoughtful and sensitive man who was unafraid to take positions that bucked the fashionable trends of his day and even of his own famous family. He criticized the dangers of false systems of meaning, such as nationalism, national socialism, communism, a false view of science, and argued that a philosophy of meaninglessness can be useful if it liberates people from such false views. 

Then, with considerable realism he also goes on to criticize those who go to the other extreme and claim to be able to live without any meaning at all. Those, such as the Marquis de Sade, who are consistent proponents of meaninglessness, are dangerous, while most people—fortunately for them—are not consistent. They can only live without meaning for a short time and in selective areas, and only then because they assume unacknowledged sources of meaning in other parts of their lives.

Huxley finishes with a sharp description of the problems created by this approach. On the one hand, by overriding considerations of truth and giving so much attention to personal needs, it creates a fateful divorce between truth and whatever is considered goodness. On the other, it becomes impossible in practice to live without meaning.

 “The mind is so constituted that a philosophy of meaninglessness is accepted only at the level of the passions and is persisted in only by those whose heredity and upbringing make it possible for them to live as though the world were at least partially meaningful.”

One might think that after this trenchant diagnosis of the radical dualism in human thinking, Huxley would urge us to take truth seriously and lean against any way in which we may be tempted to rationalize our needs—as Plato and Aristotle would have recommended.
 

 Instead, bizarrely, he goes on to take the very approach he was attacking. He freely admits that he “took it for granted” that the world had no meaning, but he did not discover it, he decided it. “I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.”

 His philosophy of meaninglessness was far from disinterested. And the reason? “We objected to morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”

Os Guinness, Fool’s Talk:

 

From Digital Anvil. 

 

Final Comments:

The concluding sentence above is a tell all.

It exposes the overall  work of many who use revisionist  language in the pursuit of their own agenda/worldview/belief system.

The mark of the rationalising intellectual is that concealment of their true objective by the reworking and twisting of terms and subtle use of words to inculcate the listener without alerting him/her to the true nature of their  nefarious  breach with reality whilst proclaiming their "truth."
 Via persistent repetition, emotive terms and consistently singular objectives in discourse with print, radio, podcast, social media and other media aligning throughout.  The interfering Intellectual gains freedom while restraining step- by -step the overall freedoms of the common woman and man. For example, Hitler's charismatic speeches. Contrast Winston Churchill's Radio Broadcasts during WW2 ? If still available, listen and watch on Youtube.

 Democracy is the ultimate solution coupled with the Judeo- Christian Framework. Truth with Compassion. Truth with Love. Truth absolutely not relativistic truths. Truth without Fear. Truth without condemnation.

As always, drop a comment whether you agree or not. 

 

 

 

  

"Beware Intellectuals!”

 

 Paul Johnson’s stunning summary of a study of Western intellectuals runs counter to what many people think, or at least once used to think.

 

 If truth is not the Holy Grail ( the Summa Grande ) for intellectuals, what is? 

Truth surely is the reason why intellectuals think passionately, read voraciously, pursue research tirelessly and argue about anything and everything interminably. 

Almost at the dawn of the Western intellectual tradition, Plato described philosophers in the Republic as those with “no taste for falsehood; that is, they are completely unwilling to admit what’s false but hate it, while cherishing the truth.” Similarly, Aristotle wrote in his Ethics that the person who loves truth for the very sake of truth when nothing is at stake will still be the more truthful when someday everything is at stake.

But that was then. To be sure, there have always been people who were skeptical about anyone who knew more than they did. How could they ever find out whether the other person was trustworthy? 
 

But now we have many people for whom mistrust is the badge they wear proudly to show their schooling in postmodern suspicion, so that “mistrust intellectuals” and “question authority” go hand in hand. After all, Nietzsche and his postmodern disciples have surely won for the moment. Truth is dead, and everything is relative at best and at worst a matter of the will to power.

 Nothing is what it appears to be. 

 

If truth was once the stated goal of intellectuals, it is now easy to read between their scholarly lines and see the petty egos and the dirty ambitions behind the lofty aspirations for truth. Truth is finally undecidable, as the postmodern philosophers express it...

 

 At best, truth is simply the compliment you pay to sentences that you happen to agree with.

However you explain the record, what are undeniable are the facts about the story of intellectuals, and the embarrassing evidence long precedes postmodernism. Many of the celebrated makers of the modern world have been shown up for their devious handling of truth in some aspect of their thinking or their lives—including Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Margaret Mead and others.

 Yet these are the men and women of ideas who have risen up to overthrow the guardians of traditional Western society, and who on the basis of the brilliance of their minds are now trusted to diagnose our ills, prescribe our remedies and direct the future for our children and for the world.

 

My Final Thought: 

Given the veracity of the books: The Intellectuals  and  Fool's Talk... 

...We are left with suspicion on our minds, disagreeable taste on our intellectual palate and a world divided and polarised by the ideas trickled down a savage mountain side filled with  twisted debris, spewed muck and silent venom. From men and women who declared their lot with intelligent banter, fiction producing worldly friction endued with relative nonsense masquerading as wisdom for the common man and woman.

Denying the truth and as some proclaimed that even telling us that they were NOT telling the truth but their thought-ful version of reality.

Recommended Sources:

Os Guinness, Fool’s Talk:  

Paul Johnson, The Intellectuals.

R.C. Sproul, Consequences of Ideas. 

 

(From and By Digital Anvil) 

 

As usual , if you disagree or..... then drop a comment as you drop by. 

 

 ( Essay based largely on Os Guinness, Fool’s Talk: )

The Art of Discernment:

The Art of Discernment:

Every day we all have to make choices. Some of these choices are straightforward, others complex. Often, we are trying to discern what is right.

The great Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon once wrote, “Discernment is not the difference between right and wrong, it is knowing the difference between right and almost right.”

There is plenty in the world that looks almost right, yet isn't the best. So what should we do? Here are four steps.

First, wait, don’t rush. Discernment takes time.

Second, be prayerful. Ask for the Spirit to lead you.

Third, ask yourself whether self-interest is your motivation.

And lastly, put the choice through the grid of God's Word: what does the Bible have to say about this choice?

This is not bulletproof, but it will help in your discernment.

Share this daily- reading.

My gratitude to Karl Faase.

From Digital Anvil.

Pursue God's Purpose for Your Life:

Pursue God’s purpose for your life

“‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you…plans to give you hope and a future.’” Jeremiah 29:11 NIV

Nothing is more gratifying than knowing one’s purpose—even when opposition seems unbearable and other distractions threaten to overshadow it. Often when people say they don’t have a passion for anything, they may be struggling to recognise the gifts, opportunities, and desires God has placed within them. Jesus refused to let anyone pull Him away from His purpose. “Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.’ Jesus replied, ‘Man, who appointed Me a judge or an arbiter between you?’” (Luke 12:13–14 NIV).

In essence, Jesus was saying, “I’m not about to get distracted by conducting an arbitration hearing between you two. That’s not part of My purpose for being here on earth.” Even up to the day that Jesus gave His life on the cross, there were many sick people needing healing and countless other impossible situations that needed His attention. He knew that through the power of His death and resurrection, all could be addressed. So, despite unresolved problems, He confidently gave His heavenly Father this report on His ministry: “I brought glory to You here on earth by completing the work You gave me to do” (John 17:4 NLT). Jesus refused to let His disciples, Satan, well-meaning family members, needy people, or anyone else distract Him from His purpose. And you must learn to do that too. This raises the question: can you state your God-given purpose in a single sentence?

 Are you pursuing it ?

The Significant Role of Dads:

Significant Role of Dads.

We live in a place of tension in modern Western nations when it comes to the role of a dad. Research tells us that fathers have a significant and important place in the lives of children and the statistics back this up.

Yet we also live in a society that on a regular basis makes fathers the brunt of jokes, and dads are portrayed as not very bright and completely dispensable.

Due to dreadful behaviour of some high-profile individuals, the term "toxic masculinity" has become a usual way of referring to men.

Yet that is not the whole story. Our community is full of dads loving their kids, contributing to their families and being a positive role model.

When we were filming the Insight podcasts in London we interviewed Justin Brierley and his son Noah. Justin is a well-known UK Christian leader and broadcaster. Noah is a social media influencer with 1.7 million followers on TikTok. Noah spoke of the positive and enduring impact that his father Justin has had on his life and his faith. It’s a reminder of the positive difference dads can make.

Why not take this Sunday as an opportunity to reflect on the role of the dads in your life. Take some time to thank God and to pray for them.

Share this daily- reading.

Thanks, Karl.

From Digital Anvil.