Philosophy of Fatherhood – A Crossover Episode with Careful Thinking

So let's move on now, Zach, to your book, "The Unthinkable Sacrifice: An Essay on Fatherhood." I'm interested to know how the idea for the book came about, and how did it develop as you were writing it?

Yeah.

So the, the book, it started as an idea for my master's thesis, and so I was, I was sort of thinking through what I could write about for that thesis and thinking about that while I was in the midst of, uh, being a young dad.

So being in the midst of kind of, you know, one of the most, if not the most kind of powerful experiences of my life.

Um, and so I really felt tugged toward kind of, uh, thinking through that experience in a really thorough way and kinda using the tools of philosophy.

So basically my, my readings that I was already doing in phenomenology at that time were kind of always illuminating aspects of that experience of being a young father.

And so I was, I was really feeling this need to try to kinda cobble, um, cobble together my experience as a father and all these readings that I felt were sort of shedding light on my experience as a father.

Um, and then trying to kinda make meaning o- of, of all that, you know, all that reading and all that fathering and how those two might sort of speak to each other.

Um, initially, as probably a lot of book ideas do, I think I had in mind to write something that was a bit more extensive and kinda more ambitious.

And then, um, and to real- and I really wanted to think through kind of a parent's love of their child as, as, um, something sort of Eucharistic and eschatological, to use a few, uh, couple big, big words, right? But those are kinda two themes that I hope to return to, um, in later work.

And certainly there's, uh, a, a streak of the Eucharistic and eschatological in the book.

Um, but it, as I was kinda researching and writing, it quickly [chuckles] became apparent to me that, uh, this was too much for a master's thesis for the word count that I was given.

Uh, and that it was gonna be plenty enough material to sift through just to s- just to kinda think through a, a simpler thing, which was, like, how a father might carry his child's soul, right? His, his child's sort of unique person and all its sort of plenitude and excess.

Um, before what I, what I didn't necessarily get to as fully in the book, uh, was this sort of arriving at the place of needing to surrender the child's soul or sort of offer it, right? So offering it sort of to God in, like, a Eucharistic manner, as I said, right? And trusting that, that this precious soul of your child to sort of its eschatological fulfillment in, in Christ, essentially.

So the book really kinda narrowed in focus the more that I, more that I worked on it, and became primarily about how, uh, how one sort of carries that, that plenitude, right? Their child's plenitude.

How a father experiences that excess in, in his child.

How he grapples with the risks and the sufferings that the child is exposed to, um, simply by, by being a human being in the world, right? And, and what it might mean to carry that plenitude in a way that is, um, prayerful and that is, uh, accepting of the fears that can, that can visit a father, right, as he sort of conducts this work of love for his child.

So that was, I was really sort of grappling with, uh, f- uh, certain fears in being a father, right, in these early years.

So in some ways, um, it was, the book was a pr- a pretty personal endeavor.

It was a way for me to sort of process my own, my own fears as a young father, as I said, and to try to make sense of them as well.

Um, and also to begin discerning what it might mean to hold those fears a little more prayerfully, maybe a little less neurotically- To offer them in more of a posture of surrender or as sort of an offering of love, I guess, is a way you could, you could talk about it.

Thank you for that.

That's right.

So in the introduction to the book, Zach, you, you write, "What I'm to undertake here is not so much a Christian philosophy of fatherhood, but rather a phenomenological description of fatherhood that is open to the kind of sacredness of the imago Dei within the human person that Christianity teaches." So I wonder, to what extent is the book a theological as much as a philosophical text? And how would you answer the criticism that you really need to be a religious believer to fully appreciate its message?

Yeah, I think that's a good question, and it really gets to the heart of a, a tension that's central in the French theological turn we talked about, right? So I th- I think that the book is, in a way, quite theological, um, but in a, in a manner that mirrors some of those theological turn, uh, writers who are operating in French phenomenology.