Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and the Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster

A philosophical memoir about becoming a father in an increasingly terrible world - can I hope the child growing in my partner's womb will have a good-enough life?

In a conversation reported by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, Franz Kafka speculated that we human beings who are alive today are merely "nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts, that come into God's head." But luckily, "our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his." Outside of the manifestation of the world as we know it, there is "plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope - but not for us."

In Infinitely Full of Hope, Tom Whyman argues that Kafka is right. Our world, right now, is terrible: our overall sense of history is one in which we simply lurch from disaster to disaster, where nothing ever gets any better and no one ever learns anything. And the world has made us terrible as well.

Part memoir, part theory, and part reflection on fatherhood, Infinitely Full of Hope asks how we can cling to hope in an increasingly unstable and terrifying world.