Unconditional respect?

I recently started reading a book by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs called Love & Respect. I'm only a few chapters in, but I have to say that it's the best book I've read all year. It is challenging me and my beliefs about a godly marriage and what it means to be a godly wife.

I'm tempted to include excerpt after excerpt from the book, but I'd end up posting most of the book. What I do want to include is the verse the book begins with that is overlooked by most men and women of the church. At least until now.

The verse comes from Ephesians and goes as follows:
"However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband." 5:33 (NIV)

Most women undestand that, in marriage, love must come unconditionally. In reality, it's not that difficult a concept to grasp. Even men get that. But, if you notice, girls, we're not called to love our husbands unconditionally, we're called to respect our husbands unconditionally. I had a difficult time with this. I mean, we're taught that respect is earned, not just given freely. But, in the marriage commitment, we are called to respect our husbands, regardless. Heck, we expect our husbands to love us regardless of our failures and shortcomings, right?

Think about it. It would absolutely break our hearts at the thought that our husbands don't love us. To a man, respect works the same way. They know deep down that we love them, but respect them? According to Dr. Eggerichs, that is the man's greatest fear.

You might not agree with Dr. Eggerichs, so here's an excerpt of how this plays out in a typical marriage:

"The Crazy Cycle often starts when women start scolding in their homes. The word scold is often associated with mothers bawling out their children; the dictionary definition, however, says that scolding means to reprimand or criticize harshly and usually angrily and even openly. When a wife comes at a husband with repeated reprimands and "scolding," this is a surefire way not only to annoy him but to treat him with disrespect. Wives, however, tend not to see this. As mothers, correction is a part of their maternal nature. Unfortunately, they tend to mother their husbands also..

When a wife scolds her husband, she's only trying to help correct things, to keep things on an even keel. And there is no doubt at times men need this kind of help. But when a man begins to feel that what his wife is saying reduces him to a child being scolded, there can be trouble. He doesn't necessarily see his wife's heart; he only hears her words, which are saying that she's looking down on him. To paraphrase Proverbs, he would rather live in the wilderness than with this irritating woman. While many wives do not intend to be disrespectful, they appear that way to their husbands, and their husbands take refuge in stonewalling them."

Book: How to Win Friends and Influence People

I just finished reading Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book was originally published in 1937 but many of the ideas and principles Carnegie mentions are still relevent. More importantly, the concepts are simple.

It's a great insight into the development of people skills and human relations. If you haven't picked up the book, I'd highly recommend it.

College textbooks are expensive

To be honest, it's been a while since I was in a college classroom, but I'm still taken aback by the cost of textbooks. I am well aware of the typical course materials cost for college students. Mainly because I work at a company that specializes in this area.

One of the perks about my job is cheap books. We're able to buy books at discounts not available to the general public. And I take full advantage of that. Especially now that I have a little sister in college. She sends me her booklist each semester, I order the books and ship them to her (also at a discounted rate).

With the new semester starting soon, I recently ordered a total of 13 textbooks for $500. I can't imagine what the books would have cost without my discount. It's just crazy.

God is not Great

One of the most popular books today is one written by Christopher Hitchens called God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Not being an atheist myself, I've been curious about its' evolution throughout the years. Of course, not being an atheist I won't support books of this nature by buying one. But, if you caught the Wall Street Journal on July 16th (republished by USA Today), Peter Berkowitz wrote an interesting and excellent review of Hitchens' most recent work. It's a bit lengthy so I'm only going to share a few clips of the article (a link to the article is at the end of this post).

I knew books of this nature made quite a bit of money, so I wasn't surprised by these numbers. According to Berkowitz, "...one stunning new development under the sun is that promulgating atheism has become a lucrative business. According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, in less than 12 months atheism's newest champions have sold close to a million books...Profitability is not the only feature distinguishing today's fashionable disbelief from the varieties of atheism that have arisen over the millennia. Unlike the classical atheism of Epicurus and Lucretius, which rejected belief in the gods in the name of pleasure and tranquility, the new new atheism rejects God in the name of natural science, individual freedom and human equality."

"Messrs. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and the rest have some fair claim to novelty. But not where it really counts. They contend that from the vantage point of the 21st century, and thanks to the moral progress of mankind and the achievements of natural science, we can now know, with finality and certainty, that God does not exist and organized religion is a fraud. The disproportion between the bluster and bravado of their rhetoric and the limitations of their major arguments is astonishing," writes Berkowitz.

This is where it gets good.

"It must be said that Mr. Hitchens is simply incapable of uttering or writing a dull sentence. And it should be added that only a very daring or very foolish person would throw down the gauntlet on an issue so close to Mr. Hitchens's heart...But his arguments do not come close to disproving God's existence or demonstrating that religion is irredeemably evil..."

He closes the review with this:
"Mr. Hitchens is by far the most erudite and entertaining of the new new atheists. But his errors and his excesses are shared by the whole lot. And these errors and excesses have pernicious political consequences, amplifying invidious distinctions among fellow citizens and obscuring crucial differences among believers world wide.

"Playing into the anger and enmities that debase our politics today, the new new atheism blurs the deep commitment to the freedom and equality of individuals that binds atheists and believers in America. At the same time, by treating all religion as one great evil pathology, today's bestselling atheists suppress crucial distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this very moment is pledged to America's destruction.

"Like philosophy, religion, rightly understood, has a beginning in wonder. The most wonderful of creatures are human beings themselves. Of all the Bible's sublime and sustaining teachings, none is more so than the teaching that explains that humanity is set apart because all human beings -- woman as well as man the Bible emphasizes -- are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).

"That a teaching is sublime and sustaining does not make it true. But that, along with its service in laying the moral foundations in the Western world for the belief in the dignity of all men and women -- a belief that our new new atheists take for granted and for which they provide no compelling alternative foundation -- is reason enough to give the variety of religions a fair hearing. And it is reason enough to respect believers as decent human beings struggling to make sense of a mysterious world."

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Source: The New New Atheism Peter Berkowitz