Rant of the Exiles

This past Sunday, our men's group started going through the book Conversationally Speaking. It is amazing to me how poorly we communicate. Most people have decent social skills but we all have glaring weaknesses. For most Asian Americans, it's mostly due to poor modeling and training. If you grew up in the bay area, chances are one or more of your parents were engineers and school never taught them how to have a decent conversation. My conversational weaknesses range from the common (running out of things to say or ask) to the more unique due to my personality (aggressive, intimating, confrontational, and offensive). That's why I'm so exciting about this book. I heard about it on a game blog that is not Christian in any way. And yet this book club this is where game and Christianity intersect . Christian men should, by default, have game because we have a purpose much larger than ourselves. The first chapter is about asking open-ended questions. Too often, we fire...

In response to Mary's comment  on my last post arguing that it's actually men who should be the gatekeepers, I thought we could try this thought experiment: Imagine a world with 100 women and 100 men. Rank them by attractiveness and put them in ten groups. Let's pretend the top decile is composed of ten drop-dead gorgeous women who also happen to be "wise", that is having self-respect and able to discern men's character. In the bottom decile are women so hideously ugly and incredibly insecure that they would never converse with another guy. And in the middle, the remaining eighty women are the "foolish", insecure, young, impressionable women that Mary is referring to. They may have varying religious commitments but it doesn't make much of a difference. As for the men, the top decile are the alpha alpha males - good-looking, successful CEO-types who are aggressive  in everything, including women. The second decile from the top has the alpha je...

You don't have to be religious to understand the value of chastity. Susan Walsh has a great post about a woman who lied about her "number" before she married her husband. Based on her post, I have three suggestions for millennial women: 1) Accept the double standard: Because men and women are different sexually - women are the gatekeepers and men are the gatecrashers  - there will always be two different standards. Accept it and deal with it. 2) Be truthful: Tell the truth about your past.  Don't mortgage the future for the present.  The greater crime than her promiscuity was her dishonesty in the early stages of the relationship. She ran the bait and switch on him. 3) Join a counter-cultural movement: At the end of the post, Susan writes: " Our culture penalizes women who hold out and require commitment before they have sex." Good words. We're living in the fall-out of a feminist society but you don't have to be another statistic. Hold out...

I spoke at UC Davis AACF's winter retreat this past weekend and had a blast. I met some awesome people. I spoke about shame and my messages weren't that clear but fortunately some asked questions. A student named Chris asked a good one. He asked me how I could say is shame is bad if shame helps us know when we have transgressed social norms. It seems to him that shame's purpose is to help us know when we've done something wrong. I completely agree. The purpose of shame is like the purpose of the law.  Romans 7:7    What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, "Do not covet."  Shame functions like physical pain. It tells us when something is not quite right. You touch a hot stove and your hand experiences searing heat and tells you not to do that again. When you are humiliated or ridiculed for ...

Positive psychology advises you to construct a new image of self and as a result your behavior will change. Christianity declares your new image in Christ and as result your behavior will change. Both belief systems correctly value thought over action, being over doing, and faith over sight. But only Christianity is based on an external reality that fully embraces our tragically flawed yet beautiful nature.

I feel like I and my fellow members of Generation X must have grown up hearing "no" all the time from our parents. Somehow hearing "no" has seriously damaged our psyche. And it's the desire to compensate for all this rejection that seems like the best explanation for why it's so hard for us to say "no" to our children. Ruben Navarrette touched on this recently in his article about the attitude of entitlement among the emerging generation. The mall Santa Claus doesn't ask if kids have been naughty or nice anymore. And parenting today is all about positive self-esteem. That means denying kids' requests or calling out their bad behavior is tantamount to child abuse. This means we often practice appeasement parenting. If my daughter says she's hungry then of course, she gets to eat right than and there (even though she had dinner a couple hours, barely touched her food, while complaining the whole meal). I struggle with this on a daily...