When Theodore Roosevelt taught Sunday school for a time, a boy showed up one Sunday with a black eye. He admitted he had been fighting and on a Sunday too. He told the future president that a bigger boy had been pinching his sister, and so he fought him. TR told him that he had done perfectly right and gave him a dollar. The stodgy vestrymen thought this was a bit much, and so they let their exuberant Sunday school teacher go. What a loss.

Unbelief cannot look past surfaces. Unbelief squashes; faith teaches. Faith takes a boy aside and tells him that this part of what he did was good, while the other part of what he did got in the way. "And this is how to do it better next time."

As they grow up, boys will encounter a staggering array of issues. In Future Men, Douglas Wilson begins with a call to fathers, and then addresses the importance of things such as athletics and intellectual tenacity, respecting girls, developing a robust work ethic, avoiding money traps, fighting idols, and secret sin. This book pushes scriptural patterns for masculinity into all the corners of a boy's life.