Unthinkable Sacrifice: An Essay on Fatherhood

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.