Dr. Alfred Kentigern Siewers is the William E. Simon visiting fellow in religion and public life (2018-2019) at the James Madison Program, Princeton University, and associate professor of English at Bucknell University. He is also reader and warden at Holy Protection Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He teaches and writes on Christian literature and ideas of nature, and on public rhetoric related to secularism and faith. His views are his own.
I don't doubt Dr. Siewers' bona fides aside from Princeton, but anyone who lays in to the Scouts for moral failings while he fiddles from Central NJ's Ivy League HQ seems to have an agenda.
The irony of this situation is that the boys and young men that could benefit MOST from Scouting, i.e., those from single-parent homes, will not "benefit" from Dr. Siewers' alleged wisdom since he's checked out. How sad, in this time and age, when Deplorablism is on the ascent, when we have more in common with a billionaire President from Queens than with the educators down the street, that men of good character are trashing and abandoning perhaps THE single best youth organization when it comes to proper male formation.
Let us not be Pollyanna. There ARE problems with BSA, no doubt about it. And yes, there are other competing clubs that MAY have a thing or two over BSA. But a century of a program that has given us millions of Eagles and even more well-developed males shoulnd't be disposed of because senior management took their eye off the ball and/or demographic changes. Indeed, the BSA attendees to whom Trump spoke in the summer of 2017 totally ATE UP his speech and his message. But then again, the Boy Scouts have been a pernicious antidote to secular modernity for those of us in the know.
