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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... Greek gods , the patron of the muses , shares his chief cult site at Delphi with its ear- lier inhabitant , the Earth Goddess Gaia . Her influence endures through Apollo's priestess the Pythia , named for the serpent that guarded the ...
... Greeks and Romans were prudes . Far from it . If you tip the guide at Pompeii , he'll show you rooms not usually included in the tour that depict an as- tonishing range of imaginative sexual diversions and positions unlikely to occur to ...
... Greek and Roman literature . The ancient writings on love that had scandalized the early 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 ...
... Greek and Roman works like Plato's Symposium and Ovid's love poems , men came to see love in more purely human terms . A man could admire , revere , and long for a woman as a human being like himself , not as a symbol for the Virgin or ...
... Greek and Roman classics , stressing manly valor , purity , moderation , simplicity , and modesty . One of the models Jean - Jacques provides for him is Telemachus , son of Odysseus and the hero in his own right of the Telemacheiad ...
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