Rant of the Exiles

In Chapter 6 of Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg tells women never to ask someone to be your mentor. She compares it to being like the young bird in the children's book "Are You My Mother?". And just like the innocent little bird who asks a steam shovel if its his mother, it should be obvious to us when someone is our mentor or not. Asking someone to be your mentor is the wrong question. She compares it to someone on a date asking "What are you thinking?" Instead, Sandberg tells women that they need to earn the right to be mentored by asking very specific questions, providing some special insight, creating some kind of value, etc. Basically you need to prove to someone that you're worthy of being mentored. And you have to do so in a way sensitive to gender dynamics (don't meet a senior man in a bar). And don't appear too dependent on others.  That makes me angry. She spends the preceding chapters telling women to raise their hands and keep them raise...

Fighting Ivan Drago:  In the late 20th century, two countries posed a threat to America's economic and political freedom: the Soviet Union and Japan.  The Soviet Union was the target of movies like Red Dawn (the first one) and Rocky IV (Ivan Drago!) and the Japan likewise was the target of movies like Gung Ho, Die Hard (Nakatomi Plaza as a symbol of Japanese capital investment in the US) and Michael Crichton's novel Rising Sun. But these two countries quickly faded as threats for the same reason: falling fertility. Author and demographer Jonathan Last doesn't quite blame everything on the lack of baby-making but in his " What to Expect When No One's Expecting " about America's coming demographic disaster, fertility is precisely the issue. It is the lens through which Russia and Japan's economic collapse can be better understood. Last makes a depressing case for what is happening not just in America but all over the modernized world. In ...

There are few spiritual forces more potent than the Asian youth group. It is a unique avenue of blessing. I was talking to another English ministry pastor in a bay area Chinese church and we both agreed on the incredible bonding effect that happens within youth groups in Chinese and Korean immigrant churches. He met his wife through their youth group. Many of my friends and acquaintances who attended an Asian youth group on a weekly basis formed lifelong friendships in the process. 20 years later, these social networks are still alive and vibrant, even when former youth group participants no longer attend church. Young people make decisions in their junior high and high school years that shape the trajectory of their lives. How does the Holy Spirit work uniquely through Asian youth groups? How are they different from their mainstream (white) counterparts? What might a sociological explanation look like? Here are some attributes that make Asian youth groups a uniquely ...

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...

Every generation overcompensates for the preceding one. A teacher at my kids' former school shared how, as a child, she used to challenge her parents' decisions by asking why. And she would be rewarded by their terse response "Because I said so". She hated it. So much so that since then she has made it her mission (in line with the school's child-centered philosophy) to explain to her students in every situation the reasoning behind her requests. I've seen this first-hand in the classroom. A couple years ago, my son's teacher (not the one above) would bring teaching to a halt for several minutes so she could explain to a disruptive student why his behavior was causing the class problems, ask him to consider other options, and then respectfully wait for him to come to a decision. It was maddening, for both me and my son. John Rosemond has a solution that these teachers would hate. He advocates "because I said so" (BISS) because: I ha...