Person or product? Subject or object?
The same question keeps finding me in different rooms. In courtrooms: is this a person, or a number the defense is trying to discount? In churches: what makes a human being irreplaceable? Anywhere AI reaches: if a machine can do what you do, what’s left that’s actually you?
I believe the answer––that you are a subject, not an object; a someone, not a something––matters more than anything I could tell you about myself. This website is about finding yourself in a world trying to reduce you to something else.
Latest Essay
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v a p o r
This summer my name is going to travel farther than I could ever carry it on my own. Some will say something I’m cautious about every time I hear it: “You’re famous now!” I’ll smile and thank them, but the…
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More Writings
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Nice Shot, Cam
“Nice shot, Cam.” A seminary student named Keagan said it to me last week during an intramural basketball game at my alma…
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Ten years of marriage
I proposed to Chelsea when I was seventeen. She said yes. A month later, my head went through a windshield. Despite the…
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My Five O’clock Wage
We instinctively evaluate life by outcomes—the wages, the blessings, the portions. But Jesus’ vineyard parable challenges us to stop staring at the…
The Book
Saving the Subject
How I Found You When I Almost Lost Me · 2024
A first-person philosophical argument for why you exist, written by someone who almost didn’t. It makes the case that we are subjects (whos made for relationship), not objects (whats measured by use). An identity that stays intact even when the brain or the body is broken.
“It shouldn’t exist. It does. Read it and reckon with what that means.”
About
From a hospital bed to the bar exam
At 17, a severe brain injury took a third of my skull and redirected my path from seminary to law school. Over the next decade I finished college, graduated law school while raising triplets plus one, and became a licensed attorney by twenty-four. That wasn’t ambition. It was survival. It was me searching for light in a darkening mind.
“No one can be themselves by themselves.”
Law Practice
Personal Injury Law
Practicing alongside the same attorney who fought for me after my injury. I’d be grateful to serve you too. E-mail cfathauer@schadlaw.com for legal inquiries and visit the firm website at the link to the right —>
The Newsletter
I write about identity, culture, AI, and faith.
When I publish something new, I’ll send it your way. No noise. Just the writing.