2010, Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 1-19 of 256 pages

Do you realize how unusual it is for a fighter to be able to keep an appointment?

Most men who have the psychology to fight do not also have the discipline to keep commitments and also take their combat game to higher levels. Not long ago I agreed to meet a young man at a certain hour and place, two weeks out, and intentionally did not check back in with him. I wanted to know if “he was the guy” that I could leave my combat material and experience with. There are local men who have long worked with me who have already taken their portion of our joint efforts. But Baltimore is fallow grown—worked clean of potential fighting men years ago. If my local successors are going to be able to do better than waste away on their own masculine island, they will need an outside connection, a Brother Band, outside of this corrupt place. I was confident he would show up, and he did, to do me a big favor.

The man has what he wants in terms of family and occupation and is still probing in my insane direction, so I know these other aspects of his masculine nature are in sync with his sense of adventure. It is not as if he is single, and will throw his masculinity out the window upon marriage, as most men do.

The next phase of the test was to challenge him to a type of fight that only a handful of men in the world can be gotten to do—the type of fight that all real men used to do, a well-considered duel with blunt weapons, not a death match, but a test, a test most so-called men in our society decline.

I posted the challenge online—a rude act—and he called me minutes later, a dark tone in his voice, accepting the challenge, which, in reality, is a passing of a brutal torch, a torch I think he is fit to carry.

It is of great interest to me that this young man sought me out based—ultimately—on a reading of John Eldredge’s book for Christian men, Wild at Heart, which he gave me as a gift, and asked for my opinion on.

John, in this book—which I suspect that former Satanist and extreme right wing masculinity advocate, Jack Donovan, used in formulating his four point masculinity code—seeks to rectify Christianity and masculinity, which, as he admits, is no easy task, but this reader believes, is a necessary one if we, as humans, are going to survive the monsters we have created in our fits of godlike aspiration.

Before I go any further, I think my pagan, heathen, Nordic, agnostic and even atheistic readers should try this book—if you are of a mind that the masculine heart of Man is worth rescuing. I have read the first half of the book and reread the first chapter, deciding that it is one of those volumes too important to encapsulate in the type of review I now reserve for comic books and novels. Ideally, a concurrent reading of The Way of Men, Wild at Heart and The Philosophy of Freidrich Nietzsche, by Mencken would, I think, zero in on the crux question of masculinity in our context, as we are sucked into an ever expanding, collective, feminist, secularity.

Where Donovan presents the aspects of the manly man in four dimensions, in the context of enemies without and an ambivalent female presence within, Eldredge concentrates not on the qualitative and quantifiable aspects of the man, but on his experiential yearnings, making the two volumes very compatible. Where Jack speaks of “strength, courage, mastery and honor,” John speaks of “a battle to fight, a beauty to rescue and an adventure to live.”

John’s evocation of scripture [old Jewish patriarchal stuff, for you heathens] and gospel [the good news that God, in the form of a heretically heroic Jew, died for your heathen sins] is mixed with his life experiences and communicated largely through reference to popular movies. He spices this with quotes gleaned from a deep reading list. This book was written to reach the widest possible audience of Christian American men, and to use the sacred and secular media influences in their life experience to light a spark in their “masculine heart,” or fan the spark that is there into a flame.

Not only have I found Wild at Heart useful, having not completed it, but it has encouraged me to read the Scriptures for a seventh time. Most importantly, I see John Eldredge’s effort as a bridge that might possibly enable a masculine alliance between Christian men who are inclined to resist the feminine secularization of life, and the various pagans, heathens, deists, agnostics and assorted masculine-oriented individuals and groups that are rejecting the very same system that strikes horror into the masculine Christian heart.

I encourage all of my readers, of all ages, to read Wild at Heart.

Thank you, Sean.

Oh, young man, in the shallows of this coming spring, when on the dueling ground, if you notice that pot-bellied old heathen drifting left—beware, that’s the leg he can still lunge off of.