Diligently Seek

In my last post I promised to publish a series of response essays to an article on The Daily Wire that reacted to the Gillette short film. I want to let you know that this project will be delayed. Today and yesterday I have been watching Dan Vogel's interview series on Mormon Stories and that has changed my immediate interest to researching Joseph Smith's methods in producing The Book of Mormon. So that will be the focus of this blog for a bit.

Men React to a Gillette Ad with Not So Quiet Desperation While cultures are far from unanimous about the characteristics – and number – of sexes and genders, there is a surprising level of correlation across societies about the precarious nature of manhood. Ethnographers from diverse backgrounds have surveyed thousands of cultures, and in most, we have found the cultural phenomenon of the “test of manhood."  (Nanda and Warms 2011, 225) It is a near-universal struggle for anyone who is claiming manhood in any society, to justify that claim. While the academy hotly disputes the anthropological reasons for this around the globe, I think the origins in western culture have a great deal to do with power politics. Men inherit an unearned privilege of power in our culture, which means that by claiming manhood, a person is justifiably subject to some scrutiny as to their worthiness of the claim. As philosopher Hannah Arendt notices, “Power is never the  property of an indiv...