This is what I hope my sons--and now their sons--inherit. Not a swagger to perform, and not a passivity to hide behind, but a manhood strong enough to weep and gentle enough to lead;

Joseph J. Bucci , Bio and Archives--September 2, 2026

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Since I have already written some articles about Family, let me write about how proud I am of my three sons. Not Fred McMurray’s three sons (FETV, n.d.), but my three sons. Each of them is honoring God with their lives, although the path to this point was not a straight line. It never is.

Their mom and I had the honor of watching them grow and interact with their friends. We had the privilege of being there in the highs and lows of competition and loss. We had the pure enjoyment of seeing young men grow to manhood and to achieve goals that they set for themselves. Now we watch in enjoyment as they begin to raise their families. God willing, they will build into their own sons’ lives a passion for life and a strong trust in God. Hopefully they will avoid the mistakes made by their own father, a first-generation Christian man from a broken home who did not have a role model in his own life for how to raise his boys.

What is true today is that all three are married with children and walking in a straight line towards Jesus Christ. What we can all agree on is… This manhood thing is tough!

I grew up in a home that splintered very early, with the marriage not surviving 15 years before separation, then divorce. My father was an angry man who took it out my mom and his kids. Was this “toxic masculinity” {Flood, 2022) or just an insecure man who hated his job? I held much of his anger towards me inside as well, and later in life would go to counseling so as to not carry forward what my father planted in me, and cause my children to suffer under the same stress.

This led me to always wonder what a true man really looked like. I experimented with relationships until accepting Christ in college. If real manhood is not in pleasing women or oneself through physical means--what then was it? I never felt really comfortable at men’s conferences, mainly because I felt lumped in with gender stereotypes. The speakers would say things like “All men feel this way;” or “We men do this and that.” I would shake my head and disagree with these generalizations.

The pastor of one church we attended suggested that we do a Men’s Bible Study using the classic book, “Wild at Heart” by John Eldredge. While the book has been praised by many men’s authors and pastors, it also has quite a few detractors (Wingerd, 2010). According to Eldredge, there........

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