“Men, at their best, are protectors.”
There’s a lot going wrong for men in America these days — boys are struggling to grow up; young men are struggling to leave adolescence behind and find genuine relationships with women; grown men struggle to fulfill the responsibilities they know deep down that they ought to embrace — so it’s worth taking time to look for the key to how men can live their best lives, a key that so many men have lost.
You see, as Jim Geraghty writes in the new cover story of National Review magazine, at their best, men “take on particular responsibilities, risks, burdens, and challenges because, on some level, we’re made for this.”
John 15:13 declares, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Very few of us are aiming for that scenario, but we’d all like to believe that in a moment of crisis, we would demonstrate love by declaring, “You, your safety, and your survival are more important to me than I am to myself.”
Perhaps the most intense version of the self-sacrifice described here is simply being a father — it’s what Jim calls the experience of “waking up one morning and discovering that an enormous amount of your own soul is invested in someone else.”
Yes, being a father is hard work: “There’s no comprehensive rule book on parenting,” Jim writes, “and, anyway, the authors of parenting books, as smart and well-researched as they may be, never met your kids. You’ll screw up sometimes.”
But you’ll learn a lot from the screwups. They’ll leave a mark, but you’ll learn from them. And next time around — hopefully — you’ll do a bit better. Unfortunately, however, too many young men in America aren’t even making it to the starting line in the greatest adventure of life. They’re still in the garage (or in mom’s basement), stuck in neutral.
In this Father’s Day special issue of the magazine, NR asked seven writers to think through the question of “Why We Need Men, and How to Make Them.”
- Hadley Heath Manning writes on how the crisis for men will affect the next generation in “Boys Need a Pathway to Manhood.”
- Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that men should distance themselves from the corrosive effects of pornography and dating apps in “Let Go the Smartphone.”
- Maddy Kearns rebuts the common distortions of masculinity in the modern world in “Masculinity as Prison or Escape.”
- Rikki Schlott provides a guide for young men trying to navigate the modern dating minefield in “Twenty Rules for Dating.”
- Katherine Howell, in “The Gift of a Good Father,” remembers her dad.
- And Robert P. George summarizes the purpose of manliness in “Running into the Fire.”
But this special issue on the art of manliness, fatherhood, and growing up in the modern world wouldn’t be complete without NR’s political and cultural coverage, such as senior writer Dan McLaughlin’s take on the early days of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign or Andrew Stuttaford’s report on his travels to Poland to investigate Warsaw’s view of the war in Ukraine.
If you’re still thinking about subscribing, today you can get a print-magazine-only subscription for just $30. That’s little more than $1 per issue and 50 percent off the cover price.
Or you can subscribe to the print-and-digital NRPLUS bundle for just $65. Instead of the $130-per-year standard price, you’ll get all the online and print content that National Review has to offer. And, remember, with Father’s Day around the corner — consider giving Pops the gift that’s better than socks.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there.