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Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual

tradition in the university, the church, and the wider

public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tomistic

Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at

to mystic institute.org. So this is the talk on parenthood.

And I wanted to just preface it with a couple of thoughts.

So the first is that during the pandemic in 2020, when we were spending a lot more time with each other than we usually did,

and I was spending a lot more time with my son, John, who at the time was

one and a half during the day. I was also reading Anna Karenina to prepare for an online reading

group that I was helping to lead. And I noticed a couple of things. The first was that the most

significant thing in my life, the thing that both gave me the greatest joy, but also sort of caused me the greatest anxiety and the thing that required the most from me was my relationship with my son.

And the second thing that I realized was that I had never been invited to reflect in a serious way, in a theological or philosophical way, on that relationship.

I had written papers on friendship in graduate school.

I had read books all about sexual ethics.

But at no point had anyone asked me to think about what fatherhood would mean for me.

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