Reading Journal - Entry #64
Defending Boyhood, Just So Stories, and The Case for the Christian Family
Welcome back to the Reading Journal! These entries are short, weekly posts where I can digest the things I've been reading over the last week or so. They also allow me to share my book recommendations with you.
This week, I finished both Defending Boyhood, by Anthony Esolen, and Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling. I also read The Case for the Christian Family, by Jared Longshore. These books were all somewhat family-focused, and that made it easy to tie all of the concepts together, especially between the books by Esolen and Longshore. The Kipling book was simply a fun read.
Let’s go ahead and dive in!
Defending Boyhood
The last sections of this book focused on the necessity of a boy’s education to allow enough time outside of school and homework for boys to pursue the things that interest them. Working with their hands, exploring woods and their natural surroundings, and building things are all activities he mentions as common ways for boys to have spent their free time a relatively short time ago in history. He acknowledges that not every boy was able to experience these activities but they were a lot more common than they are today, even though our children are supposedly free of the workplace.
Esolen also writes on the way that modern education often treats boys as defective girls, both by actually treating them that way and by telling them that constantly. This is especially bad, he points out, because boys (and men) want to know that they’re necessary. He emphasizes the fact that men are the main drivers behind innovation and discovery precisely because they’re risk-takers, a trait women don’t generally share. By trying to make them more like women and women more like men, we lose the benefits of both men and women. Men cannot perform the function of a woman, biologically or in society; it’s simply impossible. And women, likewise, cannot perform the function of a man, biologically or in society. The fact that we even have to say that is an indictment against our time.
This book was excellent and there were several good concepts and ideas that I couldn’t fit into an entry like this. I highly recommend you go read it, especially if you’re parenting boys. Regardless, it’s a good discussion of a positive view of masculinity and all of the advantages godly masculinity provides a society.
Just So Stories
These stories continued much the same as they began. There was one about King Solomon and his wives that was quite entertaining and the last story was about the first cat, describing why it is that dogs and men particularly dislike cats. Both of these stories made me laugh and were fun to listen to. The one about Solomon and his wives was particularly interesting because the moral of the story was that his wives shouldn’t have been so quarrelsome and bothersome to him.
In the story, he has one wife that is wise and a joy to him, and all of his 999 other wives (according to the story) were bothersome to him. Through a series of events, he shows how powerful he is (as the wisest and greatest king at the time) on behalf of another creature, which gets his wives to stop bothering him with their fights. It’s his wise wife that actually orchestrates some of the events that lead to his other wives leaving him be. It struck me as a story that would never be told in today’s culture. The moral is basically this: wives, respect your husbands and don’t nag them. And husbands, marry one wise and beautiful woman, not a thousand quarrelsome women.
Overall, I don’t have much else to say about this book. It’s a fun collection of stories that are entertaining to both adults and children. I imagine they would make good bedtime reading for younger children, although mine aren’t quite to that age yet. Or, it might make for some fun reading for a slightly older child who’s only a couple of years into reading.
The Case for the Christian Family
This book is excellent. Longshore treats the covenant Christian family in a way that is both easy to understand and filled with wisdom. I suspect that his recent change from a long-held covenantal Baptist view to a Presbyterian one helped him articulate these ideas so clearly. He communicates some deep theology in a way that makes it seem incredibly obvious.
This would be a great book to give someone who’s unfamiliar with the idea of the covenantal family, or who knows a little but wants to understand it better. The book’s stated purpose is to help Americans understand what ideas got us into the mess we’re in when it comes to the family and what the positive alternative is to that faulty vision. He asserts that the answer is to regain a view of the family as a covenantal body, not a contractual one. He brings up some interesting scenarios where this is specifically important for our understanding, and with each assertion, he lays out Scriptural support.
One section that particularly stood out to me is where he discussed the idea that covenant is actually more important than blood. We tend to think of blood as the most powerful binding force in our families. However, Longshore makes the case, and a convincing one, that covenantal ties between family members are actually stronger than blood ties. Blood ties, he argues, are meant to reflect the covenantal ties, not the other way around. The covenantal ties bring with them certain responsibilities and benefits, regardless of blood ties. Understanding this can help us better understand the household as scripture talks about it. A household was a covenantal unit, not necessarily a group of people related by blood, although that was often the case. He makes a strong case for the father, as the head of the household, being a representative in terms of covenants. So if the father is in a covenant, then the whole household is in that same covenant under the father’s representation. Longshore builds this out and discusses the ramifications. This principle is a foundational one to understanding the covenantal family.
I really can’t say how much I was blessed by this book. Longshore took ideas that are usually discussed in different contexts and that people usually have to piece together themselves, and he explained them all in relation to one another. It’s an extremely helpful book and one I highly recommend.
That wraps it up for this week. Feel free to start a discussion in the comments on these books and whatever books you’re reading at the moment.
If you know someone who would enjoy these posts, please share this with them. Finally, thank you for reading the Reading Journal!
In Him and for His Glory