The Unthinkable Sacrifice: An Essay on Fatherhood (KALOS) - Softcover

Mickel, Zechariah

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798385219070

Publisher: Cascade Books, 2025

Synopsis

The Unthinkable Sacrifice provides a brief and accessible account of early fatherhood using the tools of phenomenological philosophy. Mickel takes up the phenomenological task of describing the father's experience of his child’s soul. Drawing on the work of the thinkers associated with France’s “theological turn,” especially Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Levinas, he speaks of the child’s soul as a phenomenon that appears most of all through the child’s face and that issues a call for the father's attention and responsibility. Mickel then explores the unique challenges the late modern world presents for heeding the call of the child’s soul. The book reaches its crescendo with an exploration of fatherly sacrifice, those places where the child’s finitude and the father's finitude meet, those sites of communion in which the father gives himself all the way to the seeming limits of his love, refusing to leave the child alone at the mercy of the sufferings he or she will inevitably undergo as a human person. This voluntary exposure to whatever existential conditions the child finds him- or herself in, Mickel argues, is precisely the highest calling of the father's love.

About this title

About the Authors

Zechariah Mickel is an independent scholar working at the intersection of continental philosophy and theology. He is the host of Wipf and Stock Publishers' The Theology Mill podcast.





Steven DeLay is a writer living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. An Old Member of Christ Church, Oxford, he is the author of Everything (2022), In the Spirit (2021), Before God (2020), and Phenomenology in France (2019). He is also the editor of Life above the Clouds: Philosophy in the Films of Terrence Malick (2022) and editor of Finding Meaning: Philosophy in Crisis (2023) based on the series of online essays, "Finding Meaning," at 3:16 AM.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798385219070
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 82