"American suburban fantasies of manliness are used by real killers"

I have no time really to write a blog post, but I thought some of you might want to read this article: "Jesus, meth, and masculinity." Andrew Brown of the Guardian explains how John Eldredge's Wild at Heart, an American evangelical handbook to normative Christian masculinity, has become the official handbook of La Familia Michoacana, an especially brutal Mexican drug gang known for decapitation. It makes sense; the logical end of normative masculinity is unfathomable violence. But of course Eldredge is horrified by this turn of events. I don't have time right now to talk a lot of about how masculinity and Christianity make terrible bedfellows, but I don't have to: I've done it before ("Feminine Christianity"), and a bunch of people have done it better than I have ("Mark Driscoll makes pacifists fighting mad"). And of course it's nothing new that the somewhat silly daydreams of privileged people are horrific when acted out: I love pirates, for instance, except when they're real and contemporary.

Wild at Heart does happen to be on my bookshelf, though I haven't read past perhaps the fifth page or so. It is the only book I've actually flung across the room, and I made a point of leaving it where it landed for a few days before putting it away. I do not want to own it anymore. I want to be rid of the thing. But I do not know how to get rid of it. Donating it to a used bookstore seems like a bad idea because then someone might read it, and this seems like a worst-case scenario to me. Destroying the book seems like the best alternative, but the idea of book-burning gives me serious willies. Perhaps I should try to make some sort of craft out of it, but I'm not really sure what I'd make. (I'd like to make something like this, but I haven't the skillz.)