The book arrived in my mailbox some time in May, and I later learned
it was a Father's Day gift from my niece who has this on-and-off relationship
trying to make me out to be a surrogate father. I probably mentioned this
before, but absentee fathers who only see their kids on alternate weekends,
plus a week or two in summer, cannot be a true father to them in
any Biblical sense, how much less an uncle from 2000 miles away?
Anyway, three or five chapters into it, I blogged my initial thoughts, here:
But mostly, he urges his readers to be rather more pro-active than I find myself in a position to be. Some things I already do -- like bringing computer education to rural high schools, and like being strongly Complementarian (see "1st-Century Women" six years ago and "The Story About Stories" a year earlier), but a lot more of his thesis rests on being married, and I'm just not there.
Depressingly so: the next flick up over supper today has a predator stalking the heroine, and I got so angry at him for his anti-social behavior, and at her for failing to cry out so the guy in her life could come rescue her, I just turned it off. And the book does not get read. The flick is based on a book by a female author, so you know things will come out in her favor... Maybe I'll go back and finish it tomorrow after I'm rested. Oh wait, that's when I work, the flicks are supposed to be low energy passivity when I'm too tired to work. Sigh.
[Postscript] Bolstered by the assumption that the social contract between the producer of media and the audience is inviolate -- you don't kill women and children, you leave the audience feeling good, stuff like that, which if the author or screenwriters violate it, people hate your "art" and they won't pay you for it -- I finished the flick. Most of the movies on Archive.org are B&W flicks from the 30s and 40s because their copyrights expired (so uploading them is legal). The occasional color flick from after the movies started coming out in color, they are sooo bad, the producer didn't bother to renew the copyright (or sometimes didn't even bother to register it in the first place). This was one of them. "Woman runs, woman falls down" is a stereotype that I've only ever seen one violation, but not in this flick: She fell down and died. End of movie. A very misanthropic author, like the dystopias of the 60s and 70s. I should have known, it was in color.
The lesson from Hansen: Guys should be protecting women, not abusing them. The one guy in this flick trying to do that was a wimpy preacher with neither the cojones nor the skills to pull it off. That's often my problem, but usually God doesn't put me in a place that demonstrates my inadequacy. And when He does (see "It's a Fork"), I fail, then I get on with life. Slowly (see also "It Doesn't Matter" a couple weeks ago). Sigh.
Anyway, I eventually finished reading the book a couple months later. I agree wholeheartedly wth everythinghe says, but it just wasn't a page turner. There were a few gems.
I could write another book, called The Old Men We Need Right Now, but it's likely too late. [p.188]I think maybe it was the same niece talking to me on the phone a few weeks ago -- or maybe somebody else, I can now blame my hair color for the bad memory I've had all my life -- she said something like that, that we need older people to give us direction. Maybe I'm not the right person for the job, but the same idea came up in my study in Proverbs last week. It's all over the Bible, but Hansen doesn't say so. His insights are anecdotal. Maybe that's why his books get published, not mine. Whatever. Another one:
Following your heart is stupid. It leads to destruction. [p.201]OK, a couple duds. I don't think this guy is a Hebrew scholar -- neither am I, but I did learn (some) Hebrew in seminary, and I can stumble through Bible history books in Hebrew without peeking at the translation of more than a couple dozen words (poetry like Proverbs is much harder, they use a lot more words that don't show up anywhere else) -- but hesed is an important Biblical word: I once heard Hebrew scholar Walter Kaiser explain the common phrase 'hesed w'emmeth' as properly translated in John's gospel as "grace and truth." Hansen wants hesed to mean "loyalty" [p.209]. I guess there's some overlap, but the modern notion of loyalty is not really Biblical. Three pages later, he promotes the unBiblical but popular notion of unconditional forgiveness (see my essay "As God Forgave").
On the other hand nobody ever teaches the very Biblical notion that spirituality is doing, not thinking, but Hansen gives it three chapters [pp.217-228]. Bravo! Not a bad point to end on.
Bottom line: A lot of men would benefit from this book -- if they cared to read it, but then if they were into reading and paying attention, maybe they already have gotten the same message from the Bible. People don't do that. I doubt the book will help much, but at least it's not a black leather cover and onion-skin pages. Hansen's picture has a beard, but he doesn't much look like artists tend to think Jesus looks like. Maybe that helps, maybe not.
Me, I'm more into doing than reading. Hansen would probably like that. Except he would prefer you bought his books.
Tom Pittman
2022 July 16