Defending Boyhood

Anthony Esolen

Description

Western civilization has no more eloquent defender than Anthony Esolen. He has taken up its mantle and been persecuted for it. No matter the consequences, Esolen knows the vital importance that the principles of western civilization still hold today. If we hope to regain today's culture, we must remember the truths that have been relegated to yesterday.Following on his Defending Marriage, Esolen returns, this time in defense of boys and an experience of boyhood that is on the wane, if not extinguished in many quarters of the modern world. He masterfully illuminates the threats our precious sons face from all manner of purveyors and promoters of political correctness, too often hiding in plain sight. And he tackles head-on the misguided and ultimately doomed-though not before it has done much mischief-project of blurring the distinctions between boys and girls. Drawing on his own all-American boyhood, Esolen, at times wistfully, at times, playfully, and at times prophetically-in the literal sense of employing the thunder of an Old Testament prophet-details what a good boyhood once was and what it can be again. Here, Esolen shows the parents of boys how raise sons who will:Enter the arena and fight for what is right Join with a band of brothers to defend the weak Sing songs that give glory to God and honor to honorable men Slay the enemies of God, Family, and Country Give-and protect-life, especially children and family. In Defending Boyhood Esolen prescribes a return to sanity in an insane world. Enter into the world of boyhood with him and he just might change you and the lives of the boys you love.

Sujets

• Catholic Church

Informations

• Publié par: TAN Books
• Date de parution: 23 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781505112436
• Langue: English

Extrait

DEFENDING BOYHOOD
How Building Forts, Reading Stories, Playing Ball, and Praying to God Can Change the World
Anthony Esolen, PhD
TAN Books Charlotte, North Carolina
Copyright © 2019 Anthony Esolen
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in articles and critical reviews, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, printed or electronic, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture Quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version.
Excerpts from the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for use in the United States of America copyright © 1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc.—Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Used with permission.
Cover image: Baseball home base by Karen Geswein Photography / Shutterstock. Cover design by Caroline K. Green.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966063
ISBN: 978-1-5051-1242-9
Published in the United States by
TAN Books
P.O. Box 410487
Charlotte, NC 28241
www.TANBooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
For my father-in-law, Herb, the biggest kid I know
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
The Arena to Enter
Brothers to Gather
Mountains to Climb
The Man to Follow
Work to Do
Songs to Sing
Enemies to Slay
Life to Give
Foreword
W ho would think that a book needs to be written defending boyhood. Alas, given the sorry state of our gelded culture, the need has never been so acute. Our national emasculation is obvious and without precedent in the history of a great country founded by men. Even many a male lamely prattles on about the newest malady supposedly plaguing the zeitgeist : “toxic masculinity” (read: masculinity).
Yes, a book defending boyhood is direly needed. And Tony Esolen is just the guy to do it. In a Western world increasingly lacking men with chests, Esolen is a man with courage, unafraid to stand athwart the modernists yelling halt. Esolen himself has been hounded by the wolves of political correctness who have pursued him hungrily. He doesn’t care. He’s nothing if not fearless.
This book is a counterpunch from what is today the new counter-culture. The likes of Esolen and the people at TAN Books/Saint Benedict Press and, frankly, any serious, traditional Catholic, now represent just that: a counter-culture. They are the sentinels, beckoning us to return to that which is time-tested and true, whether they’ve thought of themselves that way or not. The mob of radical transformers have sought to remake marriage in their own image, sexuality in their own image, gender in their own image, and even boyhood in their own image. That is to say, of course, that they desire a boyhood that isn’t actually boyhood.
What does it really mean to be a boy? What should it mean to be a boy?
My boyhood was over forty years ago when boys were, well, boys. Like Esolen, who opens this book with joyful (but imperfect) memories of his Italian grandmother’s house, I constantly harken back to joyful (but imperfect) memories of my Italian grandmother’s house (my mother is 100 percent Italian). My kids will attest to that. A million times they’ve heard me begin, “At my grandma’s house…” I so often fondly retreat to those days in a tiny house overflowing with kids, grandkids, aunts, uncles, the thriving humanity, the loud voices, the crazy kitchen, the card games and Scrabble games until 4:00 a.m., and, of course, the food. People had their places, their roles, and we all genuinely loved it. Yes, there were shouts, disagreements, blow-ups, but there was laughter, joy, stable marriages.
There was, as Tony Esolen says repeatedly in this book, a “tranquility of order” to it all.
I could go on and on with boyhood memories. Well beyond my grandma’s house, my memories of boy-time activities range from the outright wild to the patently stupid. Such is the life of boys.
I remember six or seven of us camping out in the woods with only sleeping bags in what turned out to be the first snowfall of the year. We nearly froze to death. My dad knew, but he let us go. It was part of being a boy and becoming a man. Only after urging from my mom (I later learned) did my dad get in the truck to fetch us.
Turning the heat up considerably, I’ll never forget damn near starting a small forest fire outside Brian Fleming’s house (we called him “Flem”) one summer afternoon as we experimented with igniting various sets of brush in an overgrown lot. That was stupid. I still cringe at the thought of J. T. Zulick and I trying to smash his dad’s shotgun shells with a hammer on my back porch before someone mercifully saved us. That was really stupid. And we regularly played an infamous type of football game whereby we tossed the ball in the air and obliterated the first sucker who dared to pick it up. (A worse fate awaited the sad sack who didn’t do his boy-duty and pick up the ball, which was required of whoever was closest to where it landed.) I would here divulge the commonly known name for this game (universally acknowledged among boys of the era as starting with the word “Smear”), but I don’t want the incensed drama-queens of the new thought police goose-stepping to my house to arrest my children for my unforgivable sins of the ’70s.
Now I have boys of my own, five of them, one of which, John, I could turn into the next Calvin of “Calvin & Hobbes” legend, if comic strips were my business. The kid provides daily material. Amid a pause in writing this foreword, I heard a crash in the woods. I trekked nervously toward the noise, calling out if everything was alright. “It’s okay, daddy,” responded John. “We just pushed down a tree.”
No one died.
I lured the cabal of boys closer to the house with important news that my youngest, Ben, had just discovered a severed rabbit’s foot near the porch. Upon inspection, John enthusiastically proclaimed that the dismembered appendage was actually a “ripped apart and stretched out mutant dead squirrel’s head.” It was quite an exaggeration, but the other boys all seemed excitedly onboard for that creative prognosis. There were no dissenters.
All of that is part of being a boy, but it’s hardly a full picture. Enter Tony Esolen with his own storytelling, and his great common sense. His flashes of memory and strokes of pen are both entertaining and edifying, as is his command of everything from the arts to theology to pop culture. He starts with Augustine and St. Paul and finishes with St. Paul and Caravaggio. In between, in classic Esolen prose and style, he sprinkles in discourses ranging from the young Jesus’s relationship with his parents to the grown Jesus’s interactions with his apostles, as well as numerous literary allusions and pop-culture references, whether remarking on Tennyson or The Twilight Zone , Milton and Shakespeare and Dante, Tiger Woods and C. S. Lewis and George S. Patton, Huckleberry Finn and Horatio Storer, Rudyard Kipling and Carl Sandburg, Michelangelo and Saint Damien of Molokai, Pier Giorgio and Dominic Savio, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Odysseus, or Tom Sawyer or Clifton Webb or Jason McCord. The latter of these characters comes from an old western TV show, Branded , starring Chuck Connors, a man’s man. There, Esolen invokes Saint Josemaría Escrivá’s lesser-known exhortation: Be a man .
It is this kind of integration of higher ideas with his wide-ranging knowledge of everything from the best poetry and books of the Western tradition to films and sports that always makes Tony Esolen’s writing so engaging. His examination is more philosophical and uplifting than my personal musings of a rube growing up in Western Pennsylvania smashing shotgun shells. And yet he likewise looks back wistfully at vivid stories from his own youth—again, so many of which took me back to my own childhood.
Esolen begins by putting us at ease. He was raised in a structure very familiar to me personally: He and his mom and dad and younger brother and sister (precisely my family arrangement) living in a tiny house (which was big enough) and getting ready for Mass on a Sunday morning. Everyone did that. It was a duty. We all got dressed up and took it seriously, even as I never fully understood it all.
Yet, to reaffirm Esolen’s theme, there was a “tranquility of order” to it all. As he would say, things were as they should be, even when far from perfect. But there was a peace and stability that prevailed. It was comforting. We did not have, as we do today, “the restlessness of disorder,” as Esolen notes. Today we can’t even concede that, gee, there are boys and girls. Heck, a boy can choose to be a girl, and vice versa. It’s cultural and even spirituality insanity.
Today we flail about in uncharted waters. We live in a world in which reality is turned upside down, or at least a world in which the radical transformers are doing their best to upend it. To their eternal frustration, these ideological engineers are going to learn the hard way that this will not bring them happiness, and certainly not peace (although their misguided, if not malicious, efforts will ruin many lives in the interim). There will not be tranquility amid the disorder that these cultural Jacobins wreak as they wage war on human nature and—to borrow from Jefferson’s language in the Declaration—aggressively seek to undermine and redefine the laws of nature and of nature’s God.
Thus, this book will frustrate and infuriate the angry feminist at the university, who’s sure to stomp off to the “community diversity” czar with book in hand, consigning it to a campus blacklist with a trigger-warning affixed to the cover—all in the name of “tolerance,” of course. This book is not for her. Esolen advises