Man-to-Man with the “Legend” Michael Pakaluk
PhD, Father of 15, formerly known as the "Cotton Mather of the 21st Century"
In a recent poll, Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies found that most young men see masculinity as something society views negatively and also something that’s increasingly hard to define.
Whatever it is, it’s bad.
The documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere demonstrated how cynical many of these manosphere influencers are about engagement farming (shouting obscenities and slurs solely for clicks) but also how ineffective their “tactics” are in their own lives. As Rob Henderson pointed out, Myron Gaines of Fresh & Fit talks a big game about “one-way monogamy” until his girlfriend comes in the room. Then he becomes a deer in the headlights.
On the other end of the spectrum, the performative, “Labubu male” makes a show of how much of an ally and non-threat he is. As The Guardian describes, “You may have spotted him posing with an oat milk matcha pretending to read a copy of The Bell Jar. Or maybe you saw him seeming to listen to Lana Del Rey deep cuts but his earphones weren’t plugged in.”
Both the manosphere and Labubu males are punchlines. As the young men in the poll intuit, modern masculinity seems full of pitfalls no matter which way you turn. Yet there remains a hunger for some vision of masculine excellence.
So I thought I’d get lunch with someone a bit removed from the discourse cycle: Michael Pakaluk. If that name looks familiar, you may be thinking of Hannah’s Children by his wife, Catherine Pakaluk. Or, if you’re a Roman Catholic very involved in the pro-life movement, you may have heard of his late wife, Ruth Pakaluk. The Vatican recently declared that her cause for canonization can proceed.
In preparation for our conversation, I found an article that described Michael as a “legend,” referring to his extensive philosophical and religious scholarship and unique biography. After speaking with him, I would agree that his mind is clearly well-suited to study and his family background is indeed unique. But he is legendary in another sense too. There is something archetypal about Michael Pakaluk.
The man who was once disgusted by parents doting over their baby ended up having 15 children of his own. The man who was once a puritanical husband realized only after the death of his first wife how ungrateful and miserly he had been. And then in the dead of winter, when all hope was lost, a widower of six young kids met a young maiden in the springtime. And as the Earth came back to life, so too did he.
It’s almost too good to be true. Almost.
Michael Pakaluk is not a silly man. He has a simple rule in his house: don’t waste time. That means no video games for the kids, no fiddling on the phone. If you want to learn to be a pilot, prepare to make the PGA tour, or play a board game with a friend, that’s fine. So long as you realize how valuable time is and use it well.
Of course, Michael doesn’t waste time himself. As a young man, his devotion to study was ascetic with bouts of study often lasting twelve hours at a time. After his undergraduate studies at Harvard, he went to the University of Edinburgh on a Marshall Scholarship. He later earned a PhD from Harvard with John Rawls advising his dissertation.
He married Ruth while they were both still undergraduates at Harvard, and they started their family while he was a graduate student. When his first child was born, he realized it’s better to have a counterbalance to study. The most important thing in your life should be something you share with your wife rather than something you do apart from one another. As such, he reduced his study to ten hours a day.
Alasdair MacIntyre famously said we live in an age of emotivism, where our moral judgements are expressions of preference or feeling rather than any objective truth claims. By contrast, Michael, as befits a student of Aristotle, takes careful stock of his beliefs and adheres closely to them in his actions. As he says when we discuss the upbringing of children: “you’re going to be judged on practice, not paper.”
Michael converted from atheism to evangelical Christianity in college and became a leader in InterVarsity fellowship on campus. Friends who knew him at the time saw him as a sort of Cotton Mather figure—a very austere, intellectual like the 18th century Puritan clergyman—dropped in the 21st century. When a pastor came to speak at InterVarsity, he told the students he found trying to pray just five minutes a day to be a helpful, manageable discipline.
Michael was unimpressed. He’d read church history. He knew serious Christians were praying two hours a day, not five minutes.
One day around Christmas time, a student in InterVarsity announced he would be joining the Catholic church that Easter. Michael was troubled. This appeared a failure of his leadership—he felt this was exactly the opposite of what should be happening: “He’s become convinced by Judaizers!”
Over two lunches, Michael tried to talk his friend out of it, but his friend laid two objections before Michael. First, the church up until 1500 remained largely unified in form and doctrine, but since 1500, there was an explosion of denominations and church expressions. That seemed to imply a deviation from some prior unifying principle. Second, if Martin Luther and John Calvin came back to life today, they would feel closest to the Catholic Church and would burn most Protestants at the stake.
Ruth had read plenty of Calvin, and she concurred with his assessment. Eventually, she and Michael both joined the Catholic Church.
While Michael is a serious scholar, he is not without emotion. Once when he was walking down the streets of Edinburgh with Ruth, he saw a couple pushing their baby in a stroller. One was holding the pacifier, the other leaned around to look in. Michael turned to Ruth and said, “That disgusts me. Who are these two adults treating this being like King Tut?”
When I ask how he came around to starting his own family, he says, “Probably following the lead of my wife.”
Over the coming years, Ruth and Michael would welcome seven children (one passed away at seven months in the crib), and then Ruth passed away from breast cancer at age 41 in 1998. Michael admits that these hardships led him to realize how he’d taken so much for granted:
It’s human nature. If you lose something good that you have, then you understand the extent of the loss, and you weren’t registering all the good things when they were there. So I’m completely cured of that. Just shows you how bad I am. The cures needed for my faults have been dying people and multiple, unbelievable amounts of children.
At another point he jokes, “God said this is a very difficult case. We’re going to have to teach him his lesson over a really long period of time.”
Enter the Maiden
After the death of his wife, Michael had no plans to remarry. He was attending a Greek reading group at Harvard when he was connected with a young woman named Catherine Hardy who had recently come to town to start her PhD in economics. They met at Harvard Square, and as a test, Michael asked if she wanted to stop in the local church to pray with him. Catherine went along with it happily, but Michael admits most women would think that he was crazy.
This is how he describes himself and his actions throughout our conversation: a “lunatic,” an “oddball,” “crazy.” He doesn’t seem particularly embarrassed, but he recognizes that his life and actions are strange by modern standards.
As he and Catherine began “courting,” Michael would ask himself a very simple question: Is this a person of fine quality whose company is edifying? While he admits he had that simple criterion in place, he denies that he was truly “evaluating“ Catherine:
You come out of a period of mourning, and it’s like a long winter battered by heavy storms. And you know we courted at the time of spring, and it’s like it’s the same thing. You come out of like a long dark period, and then you meet someone who smiles and who’s beautiful and a great companion and it’s like “wow,” you know? I had written off getting married again. I just wouldn’t even think about it, but I was like, “Wow, this is like being alive again after dying.” To “evaluate” would have been, you know, beyond what I was doing.
Michael admits that his two marriages were quite different. With Ruth, they were both undergraduates doing the same activities and “the more she could act like a man the better.” With Catherine, he was 18 years her senior, and he had come to see the differences between men and women, “and that was good because that then made it more deliberately a matter of courtship recognizing radical differences.”
He and Catherine went on their first date in March and were married that same August.
They got pregnant so fast people teased they didn’t wait till their wedding night. They went on to have eight kids together, and Michael conducted himself differently: more gratitude for all the ways his wife helped him, fewer lectures around the house, less complaining. He had once thought buying his wife nice things was a form of selfishness. After all, the wife’s body is the husband’s (1 Cor. 7:4) so a gift to her is a gift to himself.
But he learned about the Aristotelian virtue of magnificence—what in Aristotle‘s time might’ve meant equipping a trireme or paying for a festival—and he became convinced that the proper passage to apply is that the Church is the bride of Christ. Just as Saint Francis of Assisi had a tunic patched 100 times but spared no expense for the chalice and vestments, Michael made a habit of honoring his wife with gifts.
He bought her fresh flowers regularly, just as Catholics present fresh flowers before the Virgin Mary. He bought her diamond stud earrings and a designer coat from Paris. Cotton Mather would have been outraged, but this new version of Michael set aside an entire budget category for this sort of thing.
Here again, Michael feels archetypal. Not only was he a heartbroken widower who learned to love again, but in that new love, his hard-bitten edge wore away to reveal a caring, magnanimous, and more joyful man.
His intentionality carries over to other parts of their marriage. They have an annual marriage retreat where they talk through all the dimensions of their life: spiritual, professional, physical, financial, and the administration of the household. Then they go through those same dimensions in the lives of their children.
And it’s hard to argue with the results. As Michael explains:
I think without appearing to brag, I can say—I will appear to brag, but without bragging–Catherine and my marriage is so appealing that our kids want to do the same thing. I said to one of my older daughters from my marriage with Ruth, “Where are my priests? I’m a father of a large Catholic family. We have no priests here.” She said, “Dad, it’s your fault. You’ve made marriage look so attractive.”
When I ask Michael if he has any advice for marriage and raising children, his answer is simple: pray. Prayer multiplies and expands your time and while you can’t give your children a prayer life, you can model the importance of prayer. When they are out on their own and realize they’re responsible for their own lives, they will begin to pray in earnest too.
As our meal finishes up, the waitress comes over to get our check. Michael offers to pay, but I protest we can split it. He turns and says to our waitress, “I’ll cover the whole thing. He can pay me back later. He can retaliate. Aristotle calls it retaliation. He can retaliate later, right?” It’s a very Michael Pakaluk moment.
In the span of a few seconds, he offers an obscure Aristotelian reference, displays the magnificence he has acquired, and does it all without fear that the waitress will think him a loon. The erudition, the virtue, the confidence that manosphere hucksters present, Michael genuinely possesses.
He finishes his beer and despite the poor service, gives her a generous tip. With a shrug, he says, “It’s Easter.” No performance, no grift. Michael Pakaluk is simply a man among men.
If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to Michael Pakaluk’s Substack here. He is prolific. And if you enjoyed this, feel free to:
I think you’re missing the detail that Ruth knew Catherine and suggested Michael marry Catherine after her death