• Our culture shapes our ideas, our cultural knowledge.6 Cultural knowledge is not only the categories we use to sort out reality but also the assumptions and beliefs we have about reality — the nature of the world around us and how it works. Our culture provides us with the basic building blocks of our thoughts, so we must ask if there is a separate male culture that provides men with ingredients for their thoughts that are different from those provided to women. Perhaps no. Perhaps yes. But it is a question we must ask.

• Our culture shapes our feelings about things — our attitudes, our notions of what is beautiful or ugly, our tastes in food and dress, how we like to enjoy life, how we experience sorrow or joy. Clearly, women have cultural permission to feel and express emotion in ways different from those of men.

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• Our culture shapes our values, which help us judge which things are moral and which are immoral. Many women would assert that men have a different moral code with its own culturally defined sins — not identical to the moral code that defines sin for women. Men and women do not always agree on which acts are righteous and which are immoral.

It may be easier for us to grasp the reality of cultural difference in terms of different generations. When I am with any of my six grandsons, I hear them speak a language different from my own. Yes, they use words that are in my vocabulary — words such as cool or awesome or radical — but they do not attach the same meanings to them. So I might ask Chris, "When you say that Eric is cool, what do you mean? What's cool about Eric? He seems pretty warm to me." I listen to the vast array of inflections used in the ways my grandsons pronounce a word such as cool, and I know that it is an important word with many meanings and many uses. I just don't speak that language.

But if my husband, Randall, and I sit sipping coffee together after breakfast, chatting about our family, our work, and the day ahead of us, I can easily assume that he and I speak the same language. After all, we have lived together for more than half a century! But once in a while he says something that reminds me that we are not always speaking the same language. For example, though we both grew up during the Great Depression and share conservative attitudes about the way we use money, we do not talk about money in the same way. His father lost his job in 1933 and was unable to support the family. My father had work throughout the Depression, and though we were poor by today's standards, we never went hungry. As a result, I tend not to worry about losing everything we have in the same way Randall does. He is more cautious about spending than I am, coming out of a life experience that is different from mine. Thus, the words save and spend carry different freight for him.7

The same thing happens countless times between the pulpit and the pew. When a pastor steps into the pulpit on Sunday morning, the odds make it likely that nearly three out of every four adults waiting to hear the sermon are women, although the ratio will vary from church to church. But the reality is that most pastors speak to more women than men every Sunday. It is this reality that makes it practical and logical to think about women as listeners: