{"id":19223,"date":"2025-12-14T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/?p=19223"},"modified":"2025-12-14T16:24:55","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T23:24:55","slug":"in-gods-image-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/in-gods-image-2\/","title":{"rendered":"In God\u2019s Image"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In a recent Wall Street Journal<\/em> review, University of Virginia sociology professor Scott Galloway\u2019s book Notes of Being a Man<\/em> confronts a crisis that has become impossible to ignore. He writes that his female students\u2014bright, capable, and ambitious\u2014express growing concern about the state of young men. They describe brothers living in parents\u2019 basements, boyfriends addicted to online pornography, and male peers who fail to contribute equally in group projects. Most strikingly, many of these women say they\u2019ve never been asked on a date. Their voices, Galloway observes, form \u201ca rising chorus expressing concern about the state of manhood.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Galloway\u2019s diagnosis is correct, but his remedy stops short. As a scholar who teaches \u201cThe Sociology of the Family,\u201d he misses the deeper truth that this singular institution has, for millennia, served as the foundation of stability and moral formation in every great society. The modern reduction of the family to a voluntary social contract rather than the seedbed of virtue has left both men and women unmoored. Since the early 20th century, progressive feminism has deconstructed the idea that men and women have complementary<\/em> roles within families and communities\u2014roles that are not hierarchical, but cooperative and interdependent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Western and biblical philosophy have shaped the moral architecture of civilization for over four thousand years. Yet the contemporary obsession with \u201cequality\u201d has often displaced older concepts of symbiotic difference<\/em>\u2014the notion that men and women flourish through cooperation rather than competition. The great women of American history\u2014Anne Hutchinson, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony, and Eleanor Roosevelt\u2014embodied a feminism rooted in moral seriousness, service, and family strength, not resentment or self-idolatry. Contrast that with the secular and materialist vision advanced by figures like Margaret Sanger, whose social Darwinism and eugenic philosophy, distorted human dignity in the name of progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

True manhood, in the older sense, has always been about moral steadiness, not dominance. Stoicism\u2014so often caricatured as emotional hardness\u2014actually prizes the disciplined practice of virtue. It teaches that wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance form the essence of the good life. These are not \u201cmale\u201d virtues; they are human virtues, equally required of women and men aspiring to moral maturity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marcus Aurelius linked manliness not to aggression but to kindness, patience, and mastery of the passions<\/em>. The more humane a man becomes, the more truly manly he is. Real strength lies not in imposing one\u2019s will but in ruling one\u2019s impulses for the sake of reason and the common good. In this sense, manhood and womanhood both represent particular expressions of universally binding moral laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scripture offers an even deeper foundation. The opening chapters of Genesis insist that male and female alike bear the image of God. Biblical manhood and womanhood begin with this shared dignity. Within Christianity, the distinctive roles of men and women in family, church, and society exist not as hierarchies of worth but as callings ordered toward cooperation and love. The Virgin Mary stands as the highest human example of obedience to the divine will\u2014her assent, her \u201cyes,\u201d made possible the world\u2019s salvation. Without Mary, no Jesus. Her example reminds us that sanctity, not self-assertion, measures the soul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The distortions of manhood\u2014abdication on one hand, domination on the other\u2014are products of sin. Christ\u2019s own model of leadership corrects both. His use of power\u2014gentle, protective, and sacrificial\u2014sets the enduring standard by which masculine ideals and feminist critiques alike must be judged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professor Galloway describes the sociological pillars of manhood as provider<\/em>, protector<\/em>, and procreator<\/em>. These are indeed vital, but each is a noun describing action without moral direction<\/strong>. Without virtue\u2014without a governing philosophy of responsibility and humility\u2014such actions descend into chaos. The cultural disintegration we see today, with movements unmoored from enduring moral logic, precisely reflects this loss of an ethical predicate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps it is time, as Galloway\u2019s title suggests, to take new \u201cnotes on being a man.\u201d But the old sources remain our best teachers. The Stoics remind us that virtue is the center of human excellence. Scripture reveals that man and woman alike are made in the divine image, called to serve, not rule, one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To rediscover moral seriousness is to rediscover manhood\u2014and womanhood\u2014as God and reason intended: cooperative, virtuous, and ordered to the good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent Wall Street Journal review, University of Virginia sociology professor Scott Galloway\u2019s book Notes of Being a Man confronts a crisis that has become impossible to ignore. He writes that his female students\u2014bright, capable, and ambitious\u2014express growing concern about the state of young men. They describe brothers living in parents\u2019 basements, boyfriends addicted to online pornography, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":19224,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1051],"tags":[1553,947],"class_list":["post-19223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-john-livingston","tag-adam","tag-christianity","cat-1051-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19223"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19225,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19223\/revisions\/19225"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}