In diagnosing the “fatherhood crisis” by referring to the meta-consequences of men being poor fathers, I think well-intentioned folks often miss the more fundamental point: Men are being poor men.

Christians, who ought to call upon God as “Our Father” on a daily basis, should naturally be fathers to the growing number of fatherless in our society today.

Here’s the joke about human fatherhood: nature doesn’t give us guys a clue; we have to make it up as we go along. And while we may get things relatively right, we are certainly absolutely wrong. We are speaking a language we don’t understand while walking a road paved with banana peels.

That fatherhood is not as “biological” as motherhood might be understood as an advantage for our time, when single men should come to see it’s good for them to assume loving shared responsibility in marriage for the children of all those single moms.

To rail against the collapse of marriage and the family without seeing that collapse in the context of the larger social and economic changes of the last century is not only to misdiagnose our social pathology but to fix the blame upon people who are in part the victims.

Is it so impossible to think that a modern vision of God as Deus Absconditus has, inversely, defected and devolved our understanding of fatherhood?

By demoting fatherhood’s centrality in our public philosophy, we demote in turn the deepest and most formative essence of fatherhood—one that personifies the capacity of humans to form deep and lasting bonds on the basis of human reflexivity, particularly embodied reason and faith.

Announcing a new editorial symposium on the value and meaning of fatherhood.