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Sohrab Ahmari challenges the postmodern Western worldview by asking 12 timeless, fundamental questions about life – and reveals that true freedom and happiness is found in the wisdom of traditional thought.
We’ve pursued and achieved the modern dream of defining ourselves – but at what cost? The influential New York Post op-ed editor makes a compelling case for the modern person to seek the inherited traditions and ideals that give our lives meaning.
As a young father and a self-proclaimed ‘radically assimilated immigrant’ opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari realised that when it comes to morals and principles he’d want his son to inherit, today’s America comes up short. For millennia, the world’s great moral and religious traditions taught that true happiness lies in pursuing virtue – and accepting limits. But now, free from these stubborn traditions, we all exercise some degree of liberty to live the way we think is most optimal – or, more often than not, merely the easiest. All that remains are the fickle desires that a wealthy, technologically advanced society is equipped to fulfill.
In response to this crisis, Ahmari offers twelve questions for us to grapple with – twelve timeless, fundamental queries that challenge our modern certainties. Among them: Is God reasonable? What is freedom? What do we owe our parents, our bodies, each other? Drawing on historical and contemporary figures from Saint Augustine to Howard Thurman to Abraham Joshua Heschel, he invites us to consider the hidden beliefs that drive our behaviour, and in so doing, recapture a more human way of living in a world that has lost its way.
(P) 2021 Penguin Audio
We’ve pursued and achieved the modern dream of defining ourselves – but at what cost? The influential New York Post op-ed editor makes a compelling case for the modern person to seek the inherited traditions and ideals that give our lives meaning.
As a young father and a self-proclaimed ‘radically assimilated immigrant’ opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari realised that when it comes to morals and principles he’d want his son to inherit, today’s America comes up short. For millennia, the world’s great moral and religious traditions taught that true happiness lies in pursuing virtue – and accepting limits. But now, free from these stubborn traditions, we all exercise some degree of liberty to live the way we think is most optimal – or, more often than not, merely the easiest. All that remains are the fickle desires that a wealthy, technologically advanced society is equipped to fulfill.
In response to this crisis, Ahmari offers twelve questions for us to grapple with – twelve timeless, fundamental queries that challenge our modern certainties. Among them: Is God reasonable? What is freedom? What do we owe our parents, our bodies, each other? Drawing on historical and contemporary figures from Saint Augustine to Howard Thurman to Abraham Joshua Heschel, he invites us to consider the hidden beliefs that drive our behaviour, and in so doing, recapture a more human way of living in a world that has lost its way.
(P) 2021 Penguin Audio
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Reviews
A serious - and seriously readable - book about the deep issues that our shallow age has foolishly tried to dodge.
Sohrab Ahmari offers a compelling account of the need for tradition in a world of arid, technocratic secularism. Combining a father's love and a crystal-clear analysis of the multiple failures of 'me-first' contemporary liberalism, he mines the past for a devastating critique of the present, providing much needed wisdom in these dark times. Beautifully written and passionately argued, The Unbroken Thread is an absolute must-read: a book that reminds us how much is at stake in some of the most urgent debates of our day.
In a moving series of reflections about figures from our culture, from Maximilian Kolbe to Andrea Dworkin, from Augustine to C. S. Lewis, Sohrab Ahmari raises profound questions about how the past teaches us about the present, and how Christianity unites to and contrasts with the human world outside the faith, from ancient paganism to the secularism of today. A wonderfully written, provocative book.
Sohrab Ahmari offers more than a vivid and learned defense of traditionalism. With fatherly love, he leads his son - and us - on a fearless consideration of life's big questions, taking thinkers of many historical times and circumstances as interlocutors. Along the way, he recovers truths about the nature and flourishing of the human person - truths seemingly in danger of being forgotten in our contentious and uncertain times.
Ahmari's tour de force makes tradition astonishingly vivid and relevant for the here and now. Only a writer with Ahmari's intellect, his audacious commitment to faith and reason, and a journalist's gift for storytelling could have pulled this off. From the first line to the last, The Unbroken Thread glows like an electrified filament, illuminating a sure path through this new Dark Age.
Drawing on the deepest wells of ancient and modern wisdom from around the world, The Unbroken Thread weaves together essential lessons desperately needed to guide a new generation into an uncertain future. Written with love as a legacy for his young son, Sohrab Ahmari has produced a gift for all of us.
Sohrab Ahmari has been thinking for himself since arriving from Iran as a youth. Paradoxically, he has thought himself back into the heart of our best traditions and has seen, with striking clarity, that the modern quest for total liberation of the intellect and will is both quixotic and damaging, individually and collectively. This clever and engaging work is the result; the dozen questions it asks are fresh, and the answers it gives are powerfully persuasive.
In a time of widespread confusion and uncertainty about the meaning of life, Sohrab Ahmari makes a strong case for the truth and relevance of traditional values, virtues, and beliefs. This is a unique and hopeful book that reminds us that the human person is made for great and beautiful things - far more than the vision of life offered by our society today.
With The Unbroken Thread, Sohrab Ahmari has written an urgent love letter to America. The 'self-seeking' that began in '60s, was the backdrop of his childhood, growing up in Iran with parents who yearned for a life of freedom, outside the confines of religious oppression. Now a parent himself, he writes of a new understanding of freedom. As having a child instantly teaches us, it's no longer about you. Ahmari uses his personal experience, but then broadens out to draw on wisdoms of all ages and faiths. He jars us out of our 'selfie'-obsessed world, with the clear message that commitment to faith, to others, and to humanity, is actually the most liberating existence of all.
In this fascinating book, Sohrab Ahmari eloquently articulates what many American Founders understood and the French revolutionaries forgot: that faith is essential for freedom to truly flourish, and that we abandon the wisdom of the past at great peril to our future. Traditional Jews, Christians and all who care about the future of the West are in his debt.
Thought provoking
We cannot undo technological or material changes; the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, as the Persian poet Omar Khayyam said. What we can do is match well-written, thoughtful and true arguments like Ahmari's with serious thinking about how to make the material incentives match them.
Sohrab Ahmari's robust defence of inherited wisdom, rooted overwhelmingly if not exclusively in the Christian faith, may be interpreted as a scholarly rebuke to the fashionable currents of our rootless age.
engaging and entertaining read
Perhaps because Ahmari is writing for his son, there is an enthralling immediacy in the way he reads.
Bristling with ideas and insights, this is a book to engage theologians and general readers alike, as we seek deeper wisdom within which to situate contemporary questions and concerns.