The Code of Man: Love Courage Pride Family Country"In many ways," Waller R. Newell writes, "young men today are in deep spiritual trouble. But they are also yearning for a way back to the noblest ideals of American manhood." The Code of Man represents a deep and thought-provoking effort to help guide contemporary men back to those ideals, as embodied in what Newell calls the five paths to manliness: love, courage, pride, family, and country. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, he argues, we have grown so concerned about the roles of sex and violence in our society that we have forgotten the older virtues: romance and eros, courage and patriotism, the blend of love and bravery it takes to raise a family. In The Code of Man, he exhorts us to look to the traditional virtues of the past for inspiration. Contrasting the time-honored lessons of traditional voices -- Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen and Teddy Roosevelt -- with the chaotic signals emanating from sources like Eminem, video games like Thrill Kill, and Goth culture, Newell illustrates how we have come to associate courage with violence, "transgression" with wisdom. Most disturbing, he argues, the essential triumph of Western culture may have left us with a building reserve of untapped aggressive energy, and no consensus about how to channel it -- a situation that threatens to weaken us at the core. Seamlessly weaving together literary references from a diverse body of sources, Waller Newell offers an open-eyed look at what it means to be a man in America today, and a clarion call to recapture our traditions if we are to preserve our character as a society ... and avoid catastrophe. |
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... Christian theologians like St. Augustine were scandal- ized by what they regarded as the folly of the pagans in believing that human beings had the capacity to achieve perfection in their own na- tures , in an entirely worldly manner ...
... Christian view of nature , man loses his direct connection with God through the wiles of a woman and her serpent ... Christian civilization of the Middle Ages tended to view erotic matters as a series of sharply contrasting extremes ...
... Christian theol- ogy -- the wide gap between the City of Man and the City of God , be- tween the sinful drives of the flesh and the innocence of spiritual purity - tales of chivalry often feature a conflict between adulterous love and ...
... Christian soldier , he was never to use his skill in fighting to afflict the innocent . He should draw his sword only to serve justice and out of compassion for those who suffered undeservedly . In matters of the heart , the perfect ...
... Christians now started to make a comeback . So it is that Diotima's Ladder of Love passed down to Castiglione's influential Renaissance dialogue on manly refinement , The Book of the Courtier . As Castiglione portrays the perfect ...
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