Rant of the Exiles

Re-enacting the Jonestown Massacre Last week, my family and I spent seven days with seven young adults from our church doing a program called Subversive Life. I stole the idea from a pastor friend who did something similar. During the day, people either went to work or helped out with a week-long youth program. In the evenings, we cooked together and then had some kind of activity.  We stayed at my parents' house while they were of town and we had a blast. We cooked together, had group devotional times, went contra dancing, attended an open mic together (along with a spontaneous jam session outside afterwards), solicited prayer requests from people at Oakridge Mall, volunteered at Cityteam, hosted a Board Game Night at church, attended an art showcase, played lots of Just Dance 4 and hung out together in community.  It was an awesome yet exhausting time.  One goal of Subversive Life was to subvert individualism. So much of my life is spent on my own, ...

I never would have predicted we'd be reading Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg's new book about women's leadership, in our men's group at church but here we are. I told my co-leader that I have strong opinions about feminism and though my views aren't completely negative, I'm skeptical on the claims of the self-empowerment movement. I'm simply not buying all of the gender equality argument. However when my co-leader suggested the book as a way of getting to know women better, I couldn't back down on the challenge of a dissenting viewpoint. We have a neat group of guys in this club. They have made unique parenting decisions. Two of the men spent two years full-time at home each raising his young son. They felt it made a positive impact on their sons and had no regrets about the experience. One dad was unemployed so it wasn't voluntary. But the other chose to stay home from work and the women in his office were incredulous. They asked him why he wanted to...

Getting guys to want to marry early is a tough sell. It's kind of like being in a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in the 21st century. You're marketing a product that is antiquated, over-priced, and irrelevant. It's an almost impossible proposition for non-Christian men since our hook-up culture sells sex cheap and our divorce culture makes marriage expensive. It's a better bargain for women since early marriage avoids unique disadvantages (subject of a future post). It's somewhat more attractive to devout Christians since we don't consider sex outside of marriage as a viable option. I'm also guessing there are some cultural obstacles that make marriage unappealing to Asian American Christian men. I'm not sure what exactly those are but I've hinted at some possibilities .  Given all this, I do believe marrying early is a good thing for men. I got married a month after I turned 23. It hasn't always been fun or easy but ove...