About
Zechariah Mickel is the author of The Unthinkable Sacrifice: An Essay on Fatherhood (Cascade, 2025) and editor of the forthcoming The Eucharist and Continental Philosophy (Fordham University Press).
A husband and father, he lives in Oregon, where he is both an apprentice plumber and a practicing Catholic. While rooted in the Catholic faith, he also tries in his own life to embody a lived ecumenism that values the witness of diverse Christian traditions.
He holds an M.A. in philosophy from the Global Center for Advanced Studies and hosts Wipf and Stock Publishers’ Theology Mill podcast. His work moves at the intersection of continental philosophy and theology, bringing these traditions into conversation in ways that are attentive to the realities of lived experience.
His research explores the phenomenology of family life, forms of life and psychological distress, the “theological turn” in French phenomenology, and currents in modern theology.
The 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.
Praise
“‘We were all children before being men.’ This formula of Descartes finds its most perfect expression in the work of Zechariah Mickel. . . . With all the resources of phenomenology, the unthinkable sacrifice of Isaac here takes on meaning for each of us. Like Abraham on the day of Isaac’s sacrifice, the child’s face definitively deprives us of our pretensions to wanting to control everything.”
—Emmanuel Falque, author of The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection
“The meditation found in these pages seamlessly draws on key insights from contemporary French phenomenology to bring an experience philosophy has too rarely brought to explicit focus: the beautiful and terrible vulnerability of fatherhood, and the joys of the sacrifice that this responsibility demands.”
—Stephanie Rumpza, author of Phenomenology of the Icon: Mediating God through the Image
“Striking in its philosophical depth and poignant in its portrayal of human existence, Mickel’s The Unthinkable Sacrifice is a wonder. As both a philosopher and a father, I found myself profoundly moved by Mickel’s insights and reflections.”
—Martin Koci, author of Christianity after Christendom: Heretical Perspectives in Philosophical Theology
“In an absolutely stunning work of subtle beauty and vulnerably concise argument, Zechariah Mickel offers a constructive phenomenological vision of fatherhood that simultaneously gives me hope and reassurance. I needed to read this book and so do you.”
—J. Aaron Simmons, author of Camping with Kierkegaard
“Zechariah Mickel has written beautifully and lucidly about the joys and anguish of fatherhood. His words spring forth from his particular experiences, but these are essentially human. They will resonate deeply with anyone who has started upon the same path.”
—Steven Nemes, author of Theology of the Manifest: Christianity without Metaphysics
“Phenomenology is, first and foremost, about bringing us back to experience, back to the everydayness of life itself. What could be more pertinent, then, than a phenomenological examination of one of the most common (and yet, in contemporary society, neglected and devalued) experiences: parenting? In The Unthinkable Sacrifice, Mickel approaches this oft-overlooked topic with the attention and insight it demands.”
—Matthew Clemente, author of Eros Crucified: Death, Desire, and the Divine in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Religion