It’s the largest bookstore I’ve ever seen!) I decided it was time to read the book for myself and see what all the fuss was about and why so many people ask for my opinion about it. (For those interested who might live near it or find themselves near it at some time-it’s the “mother store” of the chain and is in Dallas, Texas just east of Highway 75 on Northwest Highway-a few miles north of downtown Dallas. (It’s the only book by him I’ve read and I have not listened to any of his podcasts.)Ī few weeks ago I happened to see a used copy of Wild at Heart in the world’s largest Half Price Bookstore.

My immediate concern here is with John Eldredge’s message in Wild at Heart. What I mean by that is that opinions seemed largely “locked down.” No amount of discussion or argument will change them. Here I don’t want to repeat all that or go over that territory again it’s been almost run into the ground here (and elsewhere). (That is, not all males suffer from it some do-in which case others often suffer from their acting out based on too much testosterone or their inability to control the impulses testosterone gives them.) (I believe, and this is based also on reading scientific literature that “testosterone poisoning” is real even if not automatic. Both can be and often are very seriously distorted by social conditioning and sin and, at least in the case of males, hormones can distort gender-from what is ideal and intended.

As I have explained here before, based on my own life experiences and observations, and informed by Scripture, I believe masculinity and femininity are not reducible to physiology or social conditioning alone. I assume what really provokes those questions is my cautious but increasingly insistent opinion that maleness and femaleness, though equal in value and rights, equally sharing God’s image, are different in more ways than biology and contemporary sociology say. But because here I have frequently talked about the growing social neglect of, if not outright prejudice against, males-especially in education and health-people keep asking for my response to Wild at Heart. So, having no interest in that, I avoided the book. Somehow I formed the opinion that, at least in that book, Eldredge was promoting some kind of Christian form of machismo. I read reviews of it in some Christian magazines and heard that many women’s advocates, both Christian and non-Christian, both male and female, absolutely hated it. I vaguely remember the controversy over Wild at Heart when it was first published.

John eldredge wild at heart series