Who are you when the teeth come out? For every true act of leadership, there is an equal and monstrous act of sabotage. Our leaders have been entirely routed by the agitated and the anxious. These emotional tyrannies manifest themselves in local libraries, HR cubicles, elder meetings, and at your Thanksgiving dinners.

Douglas Wilson writes to a young man on how he should pursue a woman. Feminism has catechized us in many lies about what makes the sexes attracted to each other, and evangelical pastors have often only reinforced those lies with platitudes about servant-leadership. When they find out that being a doormat doesn’t attract anyone, young men often rebound to the secular manosphere. Douglas Wilson offers his own commonsense advice, sharp-edged and thoroughly biblical, not just on how to be the kind of man who attracts the right woman, but how to be the kind of man that keeps her.

The modern dating system is bankrupt. It does not train young people to form a relationship but rather to form a series of relationships, hardening themselves to all but the current one. Recreational dating encourages emotional attachments without covenantal fences and makes a joke of a father's authority. The disrespect children have for their fathers in this area is an echo of the disrespect fathers have for their own office.

This does not mean a withdrawal from politics to our own communities and churches. Instead, we Christians must take what we have learned from the wreck of secularism and build a Christendom of the New Foundation: A network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles' Creed.

This small book has two main themes. The first is the argument that Scripture requires ministers in the church to be men - that is, they must be male. The second theme addresses the reason why this has become an issue at all (when the texts are so plain) and will argue that ministers in the Christian church must be more than male - that is, they must be vertebrates. The ministry calls for men in both senses of that word.