Nathan Schlueter [00:00:00]:

I have seen around me what I what I in pervasive in our society, this kind of idealization about marriage, idealization about career, about work, and the kind of deep dissatisfactions that have gone with that. I suspect more marriages end because of false expectations going in and an inability to navigate those than many other kinds of problems. Even our self perception is often kind of warped by the way we imagine things. And let's face it, we have a culture that's in love with passion. It's in love with infatuation. All our music celebrates, celebrates this kind of heightened, ecstatic kind of experience that you get when you're in love. We think that somehow that's the purest state to be in.

Jim Spiegel [00:00:52]:

Welcome to the Kalos Center Podcast welcome everybody to another episode of the Kalos Center Podcast. Our guest today is Dr. Nathan Schlueter, who is professor of Philosophy and Religion at Hillsdale College. Dr. Schlueter earned his BA in History at Miami University of Ohio and his master's and PhD in politics at Dallas University. Dr. Schlieder is the author of several books, including One Dream or Two justice in America and in the Thought of Martin Luther King Jr also co authored with Mark Mitchell, the Humane Vision of Wendell Berry and co authored with Nikolai Winzel, Socialists, Conservatives and Selfish Libertarians, the Philosophy, Economics and Politics of the libertarian conservative debate. Dr.

Jim Spiegel [00:01:54]:

Schlueter's work has also appeared in a number of periodicals and online publications, including First Things, Touchstone, Modern Age, and Public discourse. And finally, Dr. Schlueter is the instructor of the Hillsdale College online course on Western philosophy, which I highly recommend. We'll include a link to that in our episode description, so be sure to check that out. Nathan Schlueter, welcome to the Kalos Center Podcast.

Nathan Schlueter [00:02:19]:

Thank you, Jim.

Jim Spiegel [00:02:21]:

Now, you have a big family, right? And you prioritize your work as a husband and father. So thanks for taking the time to do this. I know time is precious. Did you set out to have a lot of kids? And how do you manage to balance your domestic and professional responsibilities?

Nathan Schlueter [00:02:38]:

That's a really great question, especially because so many people seem worried right now about the demographic winter, rightly worried. And the question is, once you get demographic decline, infertility, get into an infertility decline, how do you get it back up? How do you restore it? No one really quite knows how to do it. So I've thought back to, well, why did we have so many children? And it was not a plan. It was partly being Catholic and really adopting, embracing the church's views about human sexuality was partly coming from a big family. I'm one of seven. My wife was one of seven. That was a very joyful, good experience for both of us. But we saw it from the kids side, not the parents side.

Nathan Schlueter [00:03:27]:

Looks different from that angle. So there are different joys in being the parents of those kids, but none of them were planned. They were just welcomed as gifts, and they've really been the joy of our marriage.

Jim Spiegel [00:03:42]:

That's great. I had the privilege to teach one of your daughters while I was at Hillsdale, and she was a star. I think I mentioned that to you. Dinner, some get together at Hillsdale Academy.

Nathan Schlueter [00:03:54]:

She loves it.

Jim Spiegel [00:03:55]:

You called her the. The lipstick on your family pig.

Nathan Schlueter [00:03:59]:

Yeah, she's. She makes the rest of us look good. Yeah, it's nice to have her.

Jim Spiegel [00:04:04]:

My son Andrew, who just graduated from there and got to know some of the other kids, would say that about each one of them. So it's a bunch of stars, evidently.

Nathan Schlueter [00:04:13]:

Well, it's. He' got selective knowledge of Schlueters, but they're all beautiful gifts in their own way. Just different frustrations that go with each one.

Jim Spiegel [00:04:23]:

Amen. Yeah. You teach a class at Hillsdale on love, sex and marriage. It's very popular with the students. And you teach it as one who has at least existential authority. Right. So what. What's your approach to that? And to what do you attribute its popularity?

Nathan Schlueter [00:04:44]:

I. I think in a way, there, the. The title speaks for itself. So much. So much of our lives are deeply informed by this sort of profound mystery of human sexuality. It's just one of the most mysterious parts of us and least understood. It's sacred in some sense, it's absurd in some sense, it's inspiring. And it's also deeply consequential for how we respond and live and think about our sexuality.

Nathan Schlueter [00:05:19]:

And you combine that with the fact that the floor has fallen out, the bottom has fallen out on the kinds of cultural directions, the tacit learning, even the formal theological training for so many has just disappeared. So. So you've got a mix. You've got a matching here right now in our culture of a topic that's very important for human beings to know about. And the cultural script for knowing how to navigate it has disappeared. So I think that young people are very, very hungry for some direction and guidance on. On this part of their lives. And so I came up with a course about 10 years ago, actually.

Nathan Schlueter [00:06:07]:

Some students approached me to do a course on this, and I wasn't sure how much interest there would be. And the, the enrollment was kind of overwhelming and it's been that way ever since. And I've continued to develop it. So I've made it a one stop. I've tried to make it a one stop shop for everything. Theological, philosophical, some social science, some focus on practical applications, dating, marriage, some ethical considerations about say, same sex, attraction, pornography, feminism, a deep dive into the, into, into human sexuality, sexual desire, romantic desire. So it's really. I pack a lot in there and I think that it's just had a really big influence on the students, on their choices, on their marriages and decisions when they've not gotten married, but various other decisions they've made.

Nathan Schlueter [00:07:09]:

And frankly, I think give. Given the importance of human sexuality, I think every, every young person should be having a course. It's remarkable to me that there are not more courses like this. It's even seems to me, it's dawned on me that this is a kind of course. It should really be in a core curriculum. It should be a required course for, for us, because it is so central to our lives and so important and just so interesting in itself. Not just because of its practical effects, but because what novel do you read, what movie do you watch, what song do you listen to that doesn't in some sense treat the theme. These themes that are so important for us, so, so we need to understand them and know them.

Nathan Schlueter [00:07:54]:

And maybe there was a time when you didn't need to pay such close attention. Maybe you could just kind of ride the, the kind everyone kind of trusted in the assumptions that were handed down through the tradition. But if there ever was that time, it's gone and the veil's been lifted. And there's a lot out there that if we're going to have families, raise our children, have young people that are going to go into the world and make a difference, we can't hide from it. We're just going to have to prepare them to deal with that.

Jim Spiegel [00:08:30]:

Now, is this currently one of the Hillsdale online courses? And if not, is there a plan to add that?

Nathan Schlueter [00:08:37]:

I have proposed it and I don't know what the conversations are like internally. There may be some hesitation because of all the sensitivities that would go into a course like this. It's a peculiar topic, right, because it requires some modesty, some care for, some reverence. But also it involves dealing with questions that are sensitive because of those, those boundaries. And then there are even within the Christian community some disagreements about things like artificial contraception or other things, divorce, where you just have to be super Careful. So my sense is that the college might write, I don't know. No one's ever told me this, but I think they might rightfully want to be very cautious about putting out a course like this, though I think it would be really valuable. I do tell my students, they're always asking to bring guests in when parents come.

Nathan Schlueter [00:09:41]:

They want to invite their parents come, have parents come sit in the class. And generally I tell them no, because we build up a. It's just interesting that the nature of the subject, you have to build up a lot of trust. You've got to be. There's a vulnerability involved. There's groundwork that has to be laid that's sensitive. And so if you just walk in to that class on a given day, say you're talking about Augustine or Kant on sexual desire, and that can get fairly explicit the way they talk about it. And if you don't know the background and the kinds of issues we've been talking about, that may seem to an observer coming in that you're crossing certain boundaries that the students would not perceive.

Nathan Schlueter [00:10:29]:

I've never once had a complaint and 10 years of teaching the class from a student about inappropriate comments or material or anything, that's never once happened. But I. In this culture, I try to be careful about it.

Jim Spiegel [00:10:46]:

So the virtue of. Not only the virtue of wisdom comes into play in a big way in teaching that course, but also, let's say, the virtue of discretion, maybe tactical.

Nathan Schlueter [00:10:57]:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jim Spiegel [00:10:59]:

I could see the. The hesitance there. Just from institutional standpoint. It would have to be just right, carefully planned, make it as ecumenical as possible. But yes, given the nature of that topic, it's. It's the same facts about human sexuality that make it so such a. A critically important issue for our society and controversial as well, potentially. Right, right.

Jim Spiegel [00:11:34]:

In this context.

Nathan Schlueter [00:11:36]:

And I'm. I'm confident that if the college were. If a course like this was to be produced, I think there's a real hunger for it. I think that people are constantly asking me for. For the syllabus or ask me if I'm going to write a book on it.

Jim Spiegel [00:11:51]:

Yeah. Book, parents, monograph. You're going to do that?

Nathan Schlueter [00:11:55]:

I would love to. I've got three others in the, you know, waiting in the. In the doc, so I would love to do a book on it. And there are a lot of books on human sexuality from different angles, theological angles, but none of them are quite doing what I'm doing in this class and the medium that we're using now and the video Class medium, as you know, is very effective in this culture that we're in. It seems much easier to access and much more effective for people on. Who are willing to commit to reading a book. So I, I hope that someday someone will just off make an offer. Hey, let's do this.

Nathan Schlueter [00:12:38]:

Let's convert this in a. Like you did in your Western philosophical tradition. Let's convert this into a 10 section course and go at it. And you know, you mentioned that your ecumenical approach. Many of my students, my class is very diverse actually. I get, I get Catholics, Protestants, orthodox, even the Protestants, as you know from being at Hillsdale, are not a uniform group. They get test even among themselves with reform and Lutherans and evangelicals and others. So it act.

Nathan Schlueter [00:13:09]:

So my commitment is just to kind of work through, even where those differences are. Kind of work through those, the positions, the arguments, why they're. Why they hold those various positions. And, and that ends up being really interesting. Sure.

Jim Spiegel [00:13:25]:

So a while back you gave a talk at Hillsdale that was eventually published in Touchstone, at least some version of that entitled the Romance of Domesticity. And in that piece you critique romanticism, which you describe as the impulse to escape through passionate idealization and fancy from the real world of mortal man. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Nathan Schlueter [00:13:50]:

Yeah, it's a mouthful, isn't it? Yeah, that. That piece was part of a last day lecture that they used to have at Hillsdale. What would you say on your last day? And I kind of made it into just a meditation on finitude and death a little bit, but really I just used it as a kind of self therapy. I sometimes describe myself as a recovering romantic. It's easy to see the obscene elements within our culture. They announce themselves. There's nothing. Yes, we've got a huge problem with say, pornography that demands our attention, but no one is ever going to be fooled into thinking pornography is beautiful or nice or conducive to human flourishing.

Nathan Schlueter [00:14:39]:

It kind of announces what it is. I, I think though, that there's an other side. There's an opposite danger to the obscene and that is this kind of false idealization, often as a form of responding to what people see as. As. As obscene elements within our culture. And so I, I have seen around me what I. What I. And pervasive in our society this kind of, as I said, idealization about marriage, idealization about career, about work, and the kind of deep dissatisfactions that have gone with that.

Nathan Schlueter [00:15:21]:

I suspect more marriages end because of false expectations going in and an inability to navigate those than many Other kinds of problems. Even our self perception is often kind of warped by the way we imagine things. And let's face it, we have a culture that's in love with passion. It's in love with infatuation. All our music celebrates. Celebrates this kind of heightened, ecstatic kind of experience that you get when you're in love. We think that somehow that's the purest state to be in. And so much of our culture seeks to elicit those experiences.

Nathan Schlueter [00:16:03]:

And it. And I think that there are real dangers in playing with that mode of being in the world. That. And that was a real revelation to me when I came to understand that that model was so deeply in the Disney movies and in the pop music of the height of life experiences. Being this passionate, infatuated state, despite the appearance, was actually a real escape. What was predicated on a real suspicion of doubt about hostility towards the ordinary world, which was depicted as somehow boring and mundane and not able to be lived in. And so I lived for these passionate experiences. I love classic rock and I would just turn up that volume.

Nathan Schlueter [00:16:53]:

I'm sure you're just like me. I know you love music. In high school, that was the greatest thing I thought to be in a band to. Every time I got in the car, I'd be pl. And the music I was listening to, a lot of it, sort of Prague Rock or 80s Rock, was just. Was exhilarating and there was a high that came with it. And I began to imagine the world very much through that lens and how I would live in the world. And I really got burned by it.

Nathan Schlueter [00:17:18]:

And I saw a lot of other people get burned by the expectation and that. What we might call the moral imagination on that. So I. I wrote that piece really as kind of a meditation on. On romanticism. That's what I called it, which was a. A false imagining, a. A false passionate idealizing, suggesting that maybe there's a true form.

Nathan Schlueter [00:17:39]:

And I wanted to attend to that because that's not as obvious. I think maybe some parents think that, say, romantic chivalry is the alternative to, you know, hookup culture and culture of fornication, whatever. We want our kids to be like medieval knights. Cervantes writes that book, Don Quixote. I mean, he sees that way back that Don Quixote is arguably kind of a sick man and he's a little dangerous. He's. He's in a different world. He's not in the real world.

Nathan Schlueter [00:18:09]:

And he inflicts violence on a lot of people. He's not of his mind. And So I think that's what I wanted to pay attention to, is, okay, let's take on this, you know, the culture of obscenity we have around us. But let's be very careful to avoid the kind of alternative extreme of false idealization.

Jim Spiegel [00:18:29]:

That's good. So, yeah, in. In many ways, we do live in a. To follow Cervantes, to give the nod there. A very quixotic culture.

Nathan Schlueter [00:18:40]:

I mean, you see it everywhere. You see it in. In. In commerce, for example, all of the marketing and advertising is promising you a kind of different life, a different identity, a different world, and somehow you can purchase your way into it. I think that drives the market in some ways, people thinking that their happiness consists in having rather than being. And they keep thinking, if I can purchase the next product, the next car, the next dress, the next suit, then it will finally be somehow that person I'm imagining. So our commerce is driven by that in some ways. Our work, you know, where we're constantly, you know, about the mobility of Americans, arguably an excessive mobility.

Nathan Schlueter [00:19:25]:

I was. I always ask my students, how many of you still live in the town you were born in? And it's. It's far less than half that raise their hands. How many of you live in the town your parents are born in? I'll get one out of 30 students. How many of you think you will live in the town that you were born in? Very few hands. And some people might think, hey, especially if you look at this through an economic lens. That's how labor works. You know, you.

Nathan Schlueter [00:19:48]:

You have opportunity costs and you go to. To. You've got competitive advantage. And so you go to where work is and everyone's better off. But we all know in a deep sense that we need home. Like home, a stable place is kind of a foundation for maturity and developing growth. And there's a kind of deep in the American psyche is this kind of romantic wandering. It's in our literature the sort of going to the frontier all the time, going to the next place, conquering the next frontier, which means leaving.

Nathan Schlueter [00:20:24]:

It's a real theme in Wendell Berry's work, and I think he writes on it powerfully. But I think there's a metaphysical sickness in that, potentially that we're experiencing now. It's a good part of the crisis of mental illness that we're seeing in our culture. And then suicide. You look at great works of literature. Take an obvious one like Romeo and Juliet, right? All the kids know that play. When I was a kid, it was kind of celebrated. This was the peak of love.

Nathan Schlueter [00:20:57]:

But if you read the play with care and with a little bit of maturity, you notice, for example, Romeo's in love with Rosalind at the beginning. He's writing love letters, he's forlorn, he's sad, he's depressed that Rosalind is not reciprocating his infatuation. And as soon as he finds Juliet, he kind of flips and just the whole sort of infatuation transfers to her. And the way that, that a relationship quick, quickly escalates all the dynamics that are involved with it, leading, as, you know, ultimately to suicide. Suggesting that that infatuation was kind of a. There was a kind of death wish in it from the beginning, a desire to escape from the ordinary and inability to be present and attentive in the ordinary world. So Shakespeare gives us a pretty powerful depiction of this imagination, but it's so powerful, we're actually. People are attracted to it.

Nathan Schlueter [00:21:55]:

Yeah, that's part of the problem.

Jim Spiegel [00:21:57]:

In your article, you go on to talk about the, the domestic life of marriage and kids. Would you say that the life of domesticity actually achieves what romanticism is after? And, and if so, how?

Nathan Schlueter [00:22:12]:

Yeah, that's a great question. I. I don't know that. It simply does. I think it's a task. It's a. I think one of the things I say is that Romanticism is a heresy, right? And a heresy typically is, is a sort of a belief about reality that, although false, has some aspect of truth, and it's usually wrenching some truth out of its context and giving it a kind of undue, exaggerated importance. And the, the truth inside romanticism is this erotic desire God has placed in us for a kind of wholeness that we're only going to find in Him.

Nathan Schlueter [00:22:50]:

And so it's a perversion of that. It's the restless heart that Augustine talks about at the beginning of the Confessions that has gone haywire because it refused to put God there. And the, the beauty of Christianity is that, yes, we're strangers and aliens and citizens. There's that aspect of Christianity, but there's also the, I think a very important aspect of Christianity which is. Is building the kingdom here. You know, that my kingdom is present here on earth. And that's a part of Christianity that I think is often overlooked or underemphasized. And when it is, I think big problems happen.

Nathan Schlueter [00:23:29]:

So in a fully authentic Christianity, what we are doing is sanctifying the world. And what we have to do is prayerfully in cooperation with God, follow our vocation, and see how to Be saints in the world. And so domesticity, as I see it, is an ethical achievement. It's a spiritual achievement of actually appropriating and seeing the deep beauty and richness of that vocation and that ordinariness. And I don't think it's hard to do that. It's not just like a false transparency that you're placing over what is an ugly, difficult reality. I think those of us who have experienced it know that the charm of domesticity is actually in the kind of hard edged realities that it gives us opportunities to grow and laugh and kind of know that to neither idolize, make an idol of that space, nor to sit in purely instrumental, necessary terms. And from my view now, being A father of nine kids and having been married for over 25 years, the infatuated romantic life that I was attracted to in high school, to me now it just looks really boring.

Nathan Schlueter [00:25:00]:

It looks kind of trite, it looks superficial. It looks like a dead end. And because it really is, I think it really is a dead end. I think it really is, you know, the planet is. It's what Flaubert and Madame Bovary, another great book that diagnosis is calls. It says Madame Bovary found in her adulterous affairs the platitudes of that she'd found in marriage. In other words, she'd been kind of bored in her marriage and looked for these sort of adulterous affairs, but those became boring too. And so that romantic celebration of kind of transgressive flights from the ordinary, it just really looks boring at a certain point.

Nathan Schlueter [00:25:45]:

And what really looks exciting, as you know, is just the joy and the humor and the absurdity of having a family and raising children and being in the world.

Jim Spiegel [00:25:56]:

So one thing that is guaranteed as a family man or woman and committed to the domestic life is intense drama. Right? Aren't we all. In the end, we're after the ultimate kind of beauty. There's a certain aesthetic we long for. And in my previous guest, Ted Clock, he's done a lot of writing on, on sports and yeah, athletics. And we talked about this, just that trying to get at the heart of why we all love sports so much, or those of us who do love sports, which is evidently the great majority of, of people on this planet. And I do think it comes down to a quest for beauty. Because what you get in sports is what I call unscripted or minimally scripted drama.

Jim Spiegel [00:26:51]:

You know, it's a narrative. The, the, the championship series between the my Indiana Pacers and the Oklahoma City Thunder. It's it's kind of the pinnacle of the drama that is an NBA season. And you've got all these twists and turns and subplots and main characters and minor characters and it's got. It's. It's really almost Shakespearean in terms of its infrastructure and elements. And. And so we love it for the beauty of it.

Jim Spiegel [00:27:22]:

Well, family is like that, isn't it? That the domestic life, in fact, it multiplies, you know, with each kid you have, you know, and when we had our fourth kid, that really, that created what, five new relationships, you know, and then if we had another six more and it just made multiplies out. You got nine kids. I mean, you're. It's way up there, just the number of relationships and all of the vicissitudes and complexities of, of each relationship. If you're looking for drama, if you're looking for the ultimate life aesthetic, get married, have kids and be devoted to your domestic life. Right?

Nathan Schlueter [00:28:00]:

Absolutely. It's. It's the great adventure. It's truly the great adventure. And it's the more noble. There's a lot of hunger for nobility and meaning in our culture right now. And that's where the game is. That's where the meaningfulness is.

Nathan Schlueter [00:28:15]:

That's where the adventure is. It's not in these sort of escapist fantasies online somewhere where you're just talking about whatever idea you have. That's where the real ground of it is. That world has been the joy of my life. And it's really only through taking a vow and being committed in time that you can actually achieve a kind of excellence that you can be proud of if you're living in this romantic fantasy. I know I have friends, you know this as a musician, but, you know, I do bluegrass music with my family and that's been one of the unexpected joys. Some people even joke, in fact, I've probably joked that that's why I had those kids was just to fit out enough musicians to satisfy my own fantasy of having a bluegrass band. But it's worked out that way.

Jim Spiegel [00:29:13]:

But you just didn't expect you were going to have a full on bluegrass orchestra.

Nathan Schlueter [00:29:17]:

I did not. And it's been such a joy to have that. But then people ask me about instruments and learning things and uh, in. In this world they talk about deranged musical instrument syndrome. You've probably talked about this. Usually wives complaining about their husband's fourth or fifth guitar purchase. You know, how many do you really need? And it's kind of a joke online that deranged musical instrument syndrome. But I do have friends who do have five or six different instruments and they don't know how to play any of them.

Nathan Schlueter [00:29:54]:

And that's kind of the way this sort of romantic imagination ends up working out is you, you're like frog or in the wind, in the willows. You're like toad, right? He goes from, you know, the boat to the carriage to the car. He's got these infatuations and there's. You're never there long enough invested in an activity to become really excellent and good at it and patient enough to experience the internal joy of an excellence in that thing. And families and friendships are like that. People have all these so called friends. What a terrible term that is. Friend.

Nathan Schlueter [00:30:31]:

That, that is. That was used to identify the likes that you're getting in the social world. Those aren't friends at all. When you look at Aristotle on friendship, it's the. It's a total degradation of true friendship. So friendship takes this kind of commitment. Aristotle knew this. A kind of commitment and vow and time and development.

Nathan Schlueter [00:30:52]:

And then those. You have a few fights, right?

Jim Spiegel [00:30:55]:

And.

Nathan Schlueter [00:30:56]:

And then you learn to communicate. And then there's a joy of. Kind of the. The tacit shared experiences and knowledge that comes out of that. So somehow we've got to figure out how to convey that to gen zers and their successors. Somehow that's going to be the real task is for our future.

Jim Spiegel [00:31:17]:

So one aspect of the domestic life as a father is helping our sons, if we have sons, to grow to be real men. And in your Public Discourse essay, Boys to Men, you discuss this challenging question of what it means to be a man. Do you think that's an especially important question in our culture today? And if so, why?

Nathan Schlueter [00:31:45]:

Absolutely. There are lots of writers on both the left and the right who have expressed alarm at the state of the American male. It's not just a conservative concern. There's been. Men are not flourishing in America right now. Or we might say adult males because. Because I'm not sure whether to call them men or not. That's kind of the question.

Nathan Schlueter [00:32:13]:

But adult males are not flourishing. Judging by suicide rates, health, unemployment, mental illness, drug use and abuse, we're in bad shape. And it's. It's really a kind of crisis of manhood. Because if you don't have mature men, you don't have husbands, you don't have fathers, you don't have soldiers, you don't have construction workers, you don't have all the things that men bring into the world. So there's kind of a renewed, it's nice to see in a way, an acknowledgment across the political spectrum that this kind of gender neutral society that was the goal of say, third wave feminism is really not, not only not feasible, but not even desirable. What we've learned, by the way, is that getting a male to become a man is a very difficult process. It requires a lot of cultural support and development.

Nathan Schlueter [00:33:14]:

I think men are naturally prone, as I say in the piece following another writer, men are naturally prone to becoming wimps or barbarians. We've got these just inbred instinctual drives to. To excessive love of comfort and ease and indolence or to be just kind of violent and aggressive and dominating. And so the task is to. To integrate that, that soft and that hard into a beautiful form that in the classical world they call the gentleman. I love the Greek word for that. Kaliska Agathos is from the title of. Part of it is from your podcast, right.

Nathan Schlueter [00:33:55]:

Kalos means beautiful. So the Kalas ka Agathos is the beautiful and good man. Beautiful and good. And that takes a lot of support to get a gentleman. So one of the questions that we even we spend some sections in my class on this question, what is a gentleman and how do you get a gentleman? What are the conditions? What is the education like? What are the models? Who are the gentleman that is beautiful and good man that you know of in either literature or reality? I think that's a very important project and so much importance there and causes to the crisis of men. Okay, well, what's caused that? It's a whole bunch of things, right, Jim? It's the breakdown of marriage, it's the rise in fatherlessness, it's the pervasiveness of pornography and video games, unregulated in an unregulated way. It's the feminization of society more generally. It's a kind of ideological takeover, safetiest takeover within parenting.

Nathan Schlueter [00:35:06]:

And we could talk about all of any or any one or all of those things as contributing factors to the way in which they've. So we got to hit this thing on all fronts. But you asked as a father, what can fathers do? And I don't have any algorithm for this perfect algorithm. I can only say several things that I think are true that may or may not be helpful to you or your listeners. But obviously put God first. And it's very important to you're the priest of your family, of your household, and you need to be centered in your prayer and a model of prayerfulness in your home. I think I take that for granted. But a second one I think is maybe less obvious and that is to put your marriage first.

Nathan Schlueter [00:35:59]:

That's a mistake that I see a lot of parents make where the children become kind of substitutes for the marital relationship. And especially if the parents are not on the same page with the rearing of their kids, it becomes disastrous. And God bless kids, I love them, but if they sense a weakness, they will exploit it. They know exactly how to do it.

Jim Spiegel [00:36:21]:

Well, ain't it the truth?

Nathan Schlueter [00:36:22]:

Yeah. I mean, I'm not even blaming them. I'm not even saying they're culpable. Sometimes they are. My teenagers are. But we did, we did the same.

Jim Spiegel [00:36:30]:

Thing with our parents.

Nathan Schlueter [00:36:31]:

Exactly, exactly. You know who those, you know where the soft spots are and you, and you feel them out and you find them so. But especially if those parents are not communicating with each other and really making like my parent. My kids know there's kind of a shell around our marriage which is a sacred shell of friendship. And they know where that boundary is and, and they know how that our love is different and in some sense prior to a relationship to them, it's a different kind and we give it special attention. And I think that in itself is a hugely important lesson for my kids to see that there is that very rich and beautiful. So loving your wife first is a great model for your boys. You know, your boys will see how you're treating your spouse and they will model themselves after that.

Nathan Schlueter [00:37:22]:

So much of it is follow what I do and not what I say. Right. But you want to say and do both of those things. I think it's important for fathers to have some intimacy with their children. There is a stereotype of fathers in the 50s and 60s maybe that were a little too rigid, a little too authoritarian. I think there's a real balance there. I mean, sometimes fathers do have to be, have to exert their authority. You know, I've seen this at home.

Nathan Schlueter [00:37:53]:

Maybe it's self justifying. I will raise my voice at home. I know some fathers that think it's very important to just always reason with your kids. I'm not sure where. I'm not a psychologist, I don't have a strong view, but. But I think the voice raising has served a kind of good, good role in my house when I use it very carefully and selectively to remind them who I am. But I also am very good at asking them for their forgiveness and for hugging my children and for talking to them about their feelings and and sharing my feelings and memories with them, really trying to develop friendship with them and not just be an authority with them, I guess, finally. And we could talk about parenting all day.

Nathan Schlueter [00:38:39]:

I've got all kinds of thoughts about it, but there's no such thing as parenting. There's mothering and fathering. I think it's dangerous to use the word parenting, even though I probably just used a little while ago. I think mothers and fathers bring different dynamics into the relationship. And in general, mothers are hardwired to be nurturing, comforting, protecting and meeting the needs of their children. And that's very important for them. Fathers have an important role in helping their children detach a little bit and to gain confidence by taking some risks and moving out into the world and knowing that they can achieve things, overcome difficulties to achieve things. So when I talk about this safetiest culture, I mentioned that earlier, that's a term coined by Jonathan Haidt and another co author in this book, Lukianoff.

Nathan Schlueter [00:39:39]:

Yeah, exactly. That's a really, a really good book. And I think they're really onto something. And I think it's partly, maybe the moms have been allowed to take over the family rearing and to protect your children at all costs. And because they're hardwired that way, it's not a criticism of them, it's a criticism really of the husbands who have let the mothers take over entirely and to shape all of the parenting. And of course, I think the spouses need to communicate about this, but I think fathers need to be assertive in gradually taking those children from the womb, the protective womb of the mother and bringing them out into the world. I tell this story sometimes of taking my oldest kids water skiing for the first time. And my wife was out on the boat and she was trying to make sure everyone's life jackets were perfectly secured and tight and they were sitting on their seats and she was panicking.

Nathan Schlueter [00:40:37]:

And I thought, how in the world am I going to get these kids water ski with her on this boat? So I said, dear, how about we drop you off on the shore at the beach with a book and a cup of coffee? And she said, oh, that would be so great, because she was just clearly so anxious about this whole enterprise. So we'd go over to the beach, we'd drop her off with her book and a chair, I give her $5, get a cup of coffee at the concession stand, and then we go out. And then it's. I've given my kids different assignments and I've got my oldest son and Coaxing him into the water. He thinks there are sharks in there and whatever else got to coax him into the water. And then a lot of rhetoric there, right? You don't want to guilt trip him. You don't want to make him feel terrible about himself by not having courage. Just, okay, this is hard.

Nathan Schlueter [00:41:23]:

I know it's scary. I'll tell you what, you get up on skis, I will buy you any dessert you want at the ice cream store. You just need to get up. You just need to get up once and there are no sharks and you're not going to get hurt. 35 minutes later, we, you know, we, we drove past the beach with. That's with my son Leo up on two skis. And he still remembers it as being.

Jim Spiegel [00:41:47]:

Waving at your wife on the beach.

Nathan Schlueter [00:41:48]:

And she's out of the beach. And I don't know if I don't know if she saw it or not. I wanted to show off to her. Like, look, look at the things he overcame. Right. My son overcame this fear of sharks in the water and being behind. I remember those myself when I first went. But then he did dad that needed dad to nudge him out of the safetiest womb into an unsafe space that was controlled.

Nathan Schlueter [00:42:11]:

I knew it wasn't dangerous. I knew it was safe, but I knew it was scary. So I nudged. And that's in a way, I think, a metaphor for life. You know, it's, it's, it's what dads should constantly be doing with their children is giving them a kind of a managed space for some risky behavior where mistakes are going to be made. But you can learn from those mistakes in this way that hate talks about.

Jim Spiegel [00:42:34]:

So Harvey Mansfield has this book, Manliness, that you might be familiar with. He identifies the essence of manliness with a willingness to take risks. It's confidence in the face of risks. So would you agree with that? That's at least an aspect of manliness?

Nathan Schlueter [00:42:51]:

Absolutely, that's an aspect of manliness. I think the danger just in the story I talked about, right. Look at those best bonding experiences that men report having are involve sort of collective risk taking. I like to say that manliness in some sense is achieved. It's achieved by kind of overcoming a fear and taking a risk and achieving something. But it's also received. You know, you need other people, you need other men to say, yeah, you just overcame that. And you know this Jim.

Nathan Schlueter [00:43:25]:

I mean, my wife is shocked. I was one of six boys, so my wife was one of five girls, all in a row. And Then the two boys were at the bottom. So she. She was in a world of girls, and she's just shocked by the stories we tell of our antics in the neighborhood, our fights and our neighborhood fights, you know, the. The parochial kids and the public kids ganging together, you know, the games of kickball, whatever. So many opportunities to grow in development that seem to have disappeared today, and we really haven't found substitutes for that. I would only say this about Mansfield's approach that I think he's right about manliness as kind of a quality, a spiritual quality.

Nathan Schlueter [00:44:03]:

But I'm not sure that this is the essence of what it means to be a man, as in a gentleman, that is. I don't think a gentleman is necessarily characterized by risk taking. I think he's characterized by a willingness to take great, you know, take risks for a great cause, but he knows when not to take risks. He knows when that's foolish and. And not manly. Even if it looks like. Even though rash actions look courageous to others, to a real gentleman, that's just dumb.

Jim Spiegel [00:44:35]:

There's an Aristotelian golden mean there, right? Courage. Courage is. Avoids the. The ditches of both foolhardiness and cowardice.

Nathan Schlueter [00:44:45]:

Absolutely. And sometimes the manliest thing, you know, the. What a gentleman does is. Is. Has to sort of protect, you know, to. To avoid sort of risk taking and actually kind of protect the safety of the conventions and laws against other risk takers. So it's really kind of a. You know, you.

Nathan Schlueter [00:45:08]:

You see some of the depictions of gentlemen in literature. I was in the piece I wrote, I mentioned Atticus Finch, not a conventional gentleman in terms of being able to fight and conquer and dominate others. He's not like Shane. He's a lawyer. You see this also in the Henry fona character in 12 Angry Men. Right. They're showing incredible courage in sort of confronting evildoers, but with a kind of lawfulness, with a kind of abidingness, a willingness to sort of defend conventions and not transgress them. So I think risk taking could be a problem, is my point.

Nathan Schlueter [00:45:51]:

There could be a danger of becoming. Finding your own meaning and identity by just constantly taking risks. And in our soft society, that's very tempting, right? Everything around us promises easy comfort. And so it's very tempting to just want to become. To find your meaning and purpose and become a risk taker. I think that's a danger.

Jim Spiegel [00:46:14]:

I want to return to something you were talking about a few minutes ago in terms of providing sort of exemplar for your kids in a family as a father and sort of security that comes with having an unqualified commitment to your wife and that, that creates a sort of security psychologically for the kids that is significant. My wife, early on uses, came up with this metaphor. Here's what we're going to communicate to our kids. We started this party years ago, and then you arrived on the scene. Welcome to the party. Now there are certain rules, certain standards that you're going to have to abide by if you're going to be, you know, part of this. And the day will come when you will, you know, leave the house and you will hopefully start your own party. And, you know, we will celebrate that.

Jim Spiegel [00:47:18]:

But guess what? Our party's gonna keep going after you're gone.

Nathan Schlueter [00:47:22]:

So I love that.

Jim Spiegel [00:47:24]:

Yeah, this is something we've communicated to all our kids. And so it's just this, you know, this concrete, secure foundation that, well, whatever else happens in this family, mom and dad are sticking together. And so that means the other problems are never primary ones in terms of family security. Yeah, it's secondary stuff. And we just found that that really conduces to a psychological and emotional health that's significant.

Nathan Schlueter [00:47:56]:

I love that. I mean, parties are a little wild and unpredictable. Right. And they're celebratory and sometimes you get in trouble. You know, it's a, it's a great metaphor. I will take it if you don't mind. Sure.

Jim Spiegel [00:48:11]:

Use it. Here's a question that we, we like to conclude all of our conversations with here on the, on the podcast. As a philosopher, you're more ready than most. And it's just the basic question about the meaning of life. What would your answer to that most fundamental question really, or at least one of the most fundamental questions we can ask. What would your answer to that be and how does it inform the work that you do both at home and professionally?

Nathan Schlueter [00:48:43]:

That's a big question. Hard to answer that right without, without using cliches. You know, there's, there's a thousand self help books out there that are using a cliche to talk about the meaning of life. I'll, I'll try and somehow be original. I, you know, I could give a catechetical answer like to, to know, honor and serve love in this world so we can be happy with him in the next world. You know, I, I think that's very true. It's not just a cliche. Cliches are often quite true, but they can get a little long.

Jim Spiegel [00:49:15]:

Can you repeat that? That's really rich.

Nathan Schlueter [00:49:18]:

Yeah, that's from this Pre Vatican, it was called the Baltimore Catechism. It was a series of questions and answers. And the very first question was, what was I made for? And the answer that you learned, catechetical answer, you learn, is to know, love and serve God, to know, love and serve God in this world so that you can be happy with him in the next world. And I think that's true. But what does that mean on the ground, practically speaking? To me, it means that discovery for each person is going to be a different journey because each of us have a different vocation that God has given us. You know, when Pope Benedict 16th once asked, how many paths are there to God? That, you know, the question, Matt, I think was meaning to ask, is Buddhism away to God? Is Islam away to God? And he kind of deflected the question, said, as many as there are, as many paths as there are people, meaning Christ is the one path. But Christ works in each of us in a very singular way. His call for you is gonna be different than his call for me.

Nathan Schlueter [00:50:27]:

And so for me, each. Each human life is involved in what I would call a theo dramatic. This. This deep, personal, dramatic relationship we have with God in which he calls us to live out in our unique circumstances a particular adventure. And so for me, I think that's probably the richest way to understand the meaning of life for everyone is not going to be identical, but it's always going to be a Theo drama, ultimately. And your task is to figure out that theo drama and to live it and enact it, to live out the story that God put you in and made you for. And there's something, I think, deeply exciting about discovering, you know, every day is a new discovery of that drama that you're in. And you're also using language of Alastair McIntyre.

Nathan Schlueter [00:51:20]:

We are also kind of co authors of that drama. God allows us to make choices within the drama. There are characters, there's a plot, or a lot of mini plots, unexpected turns, but we can kind of see that the whole of life is ultimately living that drama he made you for and ultimately achieving life with him in heaven.

Jim Spiegel [00:51:42]:

It's so rich. And I love how eschatological that answer is. Right. There is a next world. In a sense, this is a preface to that even greater, bigger, more real world that we're preparing for. And that's our Christian hope, isn't it?

Nathan Schlueter [00:51:59]:

Yeah. Yeah. And seeing those words, the way those worlds are related to one another in this dramatic way, I think is maybe it's a Lewisian insight, I think, you know, this is very much in the way Lewis treats it and say, the Great Divorce and other writings. So I think that's just a very, very rich way of thinking about our vocation. That's really important to understand.

Jim Spiegel [00:52:25]:

Well, this has been great, Nathan. Thank you so much. Really good stuff. Keep up the great work.

Nathan Schlueter [00:52:31]:

Thank you, Jim. You too. Thanks for having me on.

Jim Spiegel [00:52:33]:

Thank you for listening to the Kalos center podcast. We gave you our thoughts. Now let us know what you think. Email us at Podcastalos Center.