{"id":1976,"date":"2019-05-09T13:43:40","date_gmt":"2019-05-09T17:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1976"},"modified":"2019-05-09T13:43:40","modified_gmt":"2019-05-09T17:43:40","slug":"growing-thicker-skin-review-black-belt-strong-parents-guide-martial-arts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2019\/05\/growing-thicker-skin-review-black-belt-strong-parents-guide-martial-arts.html","title":{"rendered":"Growing Thicker Skin: A Review of “Black Belt Strong: A Parent’s Guide to Martial Arts”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, People <\/em>magazine featured<\/a> a piece on Professor Irshad Manji.\u00a0 Manji, according to her Wikipedia<\/em> entry, is an \u201cauthor, educator, and advocate of a reformist interpretation of Islam\u201d who currently resides in Canada.<\/p>\n

Professor Manji is rare among her kind (educators) in that she calls for her colleagues to teach their students to refrain from being offensive, <\/em>yes, but, at least as importantly, to refrain from being so easily offended.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cTeaching young people how not to be offended is to equip them to embrace people as complex individuals and not just as mascots of this or that tribe,\u201d Manji remarks.\u00a0 Elaborating, she reminds us that since people \u201cgrow by engaging those with whom we disagree,\u201d in taking offense, we enter into a \u201creactive mode\u201d and \u201cmiss opportunities to ask\u201d others \u201cwhy they believe what they do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Manji, though deserving of much praise for speaking to a subject of such critical significance as this, does, however, commit a few missteps.<\/p>\n

First, she insists upon framing her position in terms of the lingua franca of our Politically Correct Zeitgeist when Manji peddles it as \u201cthe price of diversity<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In and of itself, there is nothing inherently untrue about this. Yet \u201cdiversity\u201d has become a talismanic PC buzzword.\u00a0 In affirming \u201cdiversity,\u201d Manji reinforces the very PC culture that is the ultimate cause of the very problem\u2014the readiness, indeed, the eagerness, to take offense\u2014that she attempts to solve.<\/p>\n

And this brings us to the second flaw in her analysis: It is hardly just children that need to be taught to grow thicker skin.\u00a0 Children, being children, are naturally sensitive, hyper-sensitive, in fact.\u00a0 They are, by definition, immature.\u00a0 They most certainly do need to be taught to be less vulnerable to taking offense, but who can be expected to teach them when so many of the adults<\/em> in their lives\u2014especially those adults in the field of education<\/em>\u2014seem to specialize in proliferating grievances.<\/p>\n

The readiness to take offense, a function of the immaturity that we expect to find in children, the men and women of this hyper-sensitive, Politically Correct generation have reinforced.<\/p>\n

Third, Manji, interestingly enough, quotes Bruce Lee in defense of her thesis.\u00a0 Lee, probably the most famous of martial artists to have ever lived, memorably implored his students to become \u201clike water.\u201d\u00a0 Lee was drawing upon an ancient Taoist tradition within which water, insofar as it adapts effortlessly to its surroundings, figures as the prime illustration of the Tao<\/em>, the Way of nature, the universe, reality.<\/p>\n

There is no resistance within water, but it can unfailingly be counted upon to accommodate and, by way of this accommodation, ultimately prevail over all obstacles.<\/p>\n

Since kids, too, need to be taught how to adapt and learn, Manji\u2019s recommendation is that their teachers instruct them in the way of a kind of \u201cmoral martial arts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d go to school for that,\u201d she concludes.<\/p>\n

To repeat, Professor Manji is richly deserving of no small amount of praise for her efforts in this regard.\u00a0 Yet the \u201cmoral martial arts\u201d that she proposes as the antidote to a culture of grievance is already offered in dojos around the country.\u00a0 To put it another way, \u201cmoral <\/em>martial arts\u201d is a term that is meaningless by reason of redundancy, for training in the martial arts is an intrinsically, preeminently moral<\/em> activity.<\/p>\n

It is part of an education in virtue.<\/p>\n

Both the young and the not-so-young alike can immunize themselves against being easily offended by practicing the martial arts.<\/p>\n

Just ask Peter Liciaga.<\/p>\n

Liciaga is a self-defense, martial arts educator and a personal development coach and speaker.\u00a0 With nearly 50 years of experience in the martial arts, Liciaga is a sixth-degree black belt in Tang Soo Do, the same art of which Chuck Norris, Steve McQueen, and Michael Jai White are among the most famous contemporary practitioners.<\/p>\n

For the last two decades, this native of a Bronx housing project, a Puerto Rican who spent much of his turbulent youth in a street gang before embarking upon a career in theater, in dance, that would take him to Europe and even Hollywood, has been imparting his passion and skill in the martial arts to the men, women, and children who have enrolled in Dinoto Karate Center in Mount Laurel, New Jersey.<\/p>\n

Master Liciaga, you see, is my <\/em>master, and Dinoto Karate Center (DKC) is the school at which I\u2019ve been fortunate enough to learn from him.<\/p>\n

Hot off the presses is Master Liciaga\u2019s first book, Black Belt Strong: A Parent\u2019s Guide to Martial Arts. \u00a0<\/em>Huston Smith, a preeminent scholar of the world\u2019s religions, once said of the Tao Te Ching, <\/em>a slim text that for well over two millennia has served as the sacred scripture, so to speak, of Taoism, that it is a book that could be read in the span of a single sitting or that of a lifetime.<\/p>\n

The same can be said of Liciaga\u2019s latest work.\u00a0 Black Belt Strong <\/em>is written in prose that is as accessible as its style is engaging, for it is self-evident to the reader that the insights that Liciaga supplies to parents, far from being the abstract clich\u00e9s and feel-good sentimentalisms that are the stuff of the proverbial Chinese cookie, are hard-earned pearls of wisdom born of grueling experience: The author of Black Belt Strong <\/em>seamlessly blends the personal and the professional dimensions of his life, universal truths and particular illustrations of these truths, into one tight little text.<\/p>\n

While martial or physical prowess for purposes of self-defense is obviously essential to the martial arts, Professor Manji is representative of the average person in thinking that it pertains solely <\/em>to the physical.\u00a0 This is a profound misunderstanding, as Master Liciaga, echoing the thought of martial arts masters from throughout the generations, emphatically and repeatedly stresses.\u00a0 \u201cMartial arts is not just about fighting,\u201d Liciaga writes.\u00a0 \u201cMartial arts is about focus, self-discipline, self-control, personal growth and empowerment.\u201d\u00a0 It consists, fundamentally, in knowing \u201cwhat is right and what is wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

This veteran martial artist and teacher is emphatic: True <\/em>martial artists \u201cavoid fights,\u201d for they \u201cdo not want to hurt anything or anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

The martial arts constitute a mode of human existence in that the arts are designed to cultivate the virtues of character and even intellect, the excellences of head and heart, no less than those of the body.<\/p>\n

The martial arts, as Master Liciaga has taught me and countless others, reaffirm something that Western philosophy has largely forgotten, despite having been informed for almost 2,000 years by Christianity (a worldview that, with its unique doctrine of the Incarnation of God, endorses to a greater extent than any other the goodness of matter):<\/p>\n

The human person is a psycho-somatic unity, a spiritual being who doesn\u2019t inhabit <\/em>a body, but who is<\/em> a body (though not just <\/em>a body).<\/p>\n

In learning how to move and discipline our bodies, we discipline our minds\u2014and vice versa.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the mats\u201d at Dinoto Karate Center, Master Liciaga, along with Masters Michael and Erika Dinoto, is changing lives, the lives of children, definitely, but as well those of women and men (like yours truly).\u00a0 It is my hope that while Black Belt Strong: A Parent\u2019s Guide to Martial Arts <\/em>is Master Liciaga\u2019s first book, it is far from his last.<\/p>\n

Irshad Manji and anyone who is concerned with relieving the next generation of the intolerable burden of being perpetually offended will be well served by reading Master Liciaga\u2019s work (and\/or, for that matter, visiting his daily podcasts that he posts on his Facebook page and Youtube channel).<\/p>\n

After all, it is no mean feat for anyone, of any age, to remain forever sensitive to insults, perceived or imaginary, when Peter Liciaga is constantly calling them, as he writes in his book, \u201cto always be the peace<\/em>\u201d and \u201cthe still<\/em> amidst the storm.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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