Amid the din that is the debate over the role and place of men in today’s society, a Latter-day Saint apostle has ventured his own take.

Posting on social media Thursday, Dale G. Renlund, a high-ranking leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, declared: “Real men are accountable for their actions, acknowledge their mistakes, apologize and try to set things right.”

Renlund, a former cardiologist who previously taught medicine at the University of Utah, then described a recent experience in which his wife, Ruth, struggled to make it through her Sunday school lesson for a class of 12- and 13-year-olds.

“Some of the young men were acting like, well, 12- and 13-year-old young men,” Renlund writes. “They were a bit casual and less than engaged than ideal in the lesson about Job.”

Handouts quickly became paper airplanes (“Is anyone surprised?” Renlund muses), which Ruth collected before moving on.

No great harm, Renlund said. And yet, the following Thursday, there was a knock on the couple’s door. It was three of the boys from the class. They handed Ruth a note and a vase full of paper airplanes, their ends decorated with colorful drawings.

“We want to apologize for our behavior in Sunday school,” the note read. “We meant no disrespect even though our actions said otherwise.”

Renlund closes his post about the event: “I am grateful for their example to me of being priesthood holders and real men.”

While the post is unlikely to solve one of the hottest culture wars, comments applauded the story and the boys at the center of it.

“I still have a sorry letter some teen boys sent me in seminary for being loud and disruptive,” writes one. “I was so proud of them, and it just made me love them as their teacher all the more.”

Posts another: “I have more than a few letters to write.”

Latter-day Saint Taylor Petrey, a scholar of Mormonism and gender, sees a tension in Renlund’s definition, however, pointing to a controversial statement from the past by the current leader of the global faith.

Speaking with The Salt Lake Tribune in 2015, apostle Dallin H. Oaks, now the faith’s president, stated that “the history of the church is not to seek apologies or to give them.”

True, Petrey said Thursday, “Oaks was speaking at an institutional level, not about individuals.”

Nevertheless, the Kalamazoo College professor continued, “Renlund’s praise for apologizing seems to challenge the principles that Oaks had laid out.”

Then again, Petrey noted, “In an era where popular voices and political leaders regularly disrespect women, Latter-day Saints are hoping to offer a different view of masculinity.”

That view — which “isn’t necessarily new” — he said is that “men cry. Men take responsibility. Men apologize.”