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.

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.

Perhaps because Ahmari is writing for his son, there is an enthralling immediacy in the way he reads.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

A serious - and seriously readable - book about the deep issues that our shallow age has foolishly tried to dodge.

__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

__Twelve timeless and fundamental questions that a confident, progressive society should be able to answer - but doesn't think to ask.__

Sohrab Ahmari

Part 1 - Unbroken Thread

Part 2 - Unbroken Thread

Part 3 - Unbroken Thread

Part 4 - Unbroken Thread

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Part 7 - Unbroken Thread

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Part 9 - Unbroken Thread

Part 10 - Unbroken Thread

Part 11 - Unbroken Thread

Part 12 - Unbroken Thread

Part 13 - Unbroken Thread

Part 14 - Unbroken Thread

Part 15 - Unbroken Thread

Part 16 - Unbroken Thread

Part 17 - Unbroken Thread

Part 18 - Unbroken Thread

Part 19 - Unbroken Thread

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

\["For Christians looking for the meaning in society","Sohrab Ahmari looks to the past for broad moral guidance","You'll find old ways of living in the new world"\]

A Note on Scripture

Introduction

__Part I: The Things of God__

Question One: How Do You Justify Your Life?

Question Two: Is God Reasonable?

Question Three: Why Would God Want You to Take a Day Off?

Question Four: Can You Be Spiritual Without Being Religious?

Question Five: Does God Respect You?

Question Six: Does God Need Politics?

__Part II: The Things of Humankind__

Question Seven: How Must You Serve Your Parents?

Question Eight: Should You Think for Yourself?

Question Nine: What Is Freedom For?

Question Ten: Is Sex a Private Matter?

Question Eleven: What Do You Owe Your Body?

Question Twelve: What’s Good about Death?

Conclusion: A Letter to Maximilian

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

A serious - and seriously readable - book about the deep issues that our shallow age has foolishly tried to dodge.

__Douglas Murray__

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.

__Giles Fraser__

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.

__Thomas Pink, professor of philosophy, King's College London__

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.

__Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York__

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.

__Rod Dreher__

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.

__Patrick J. Deneen, professor of political science, University of Notre Dame__

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.

__Adrian Vermeule, Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School__

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.

__Most Rev. José H. Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles__

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.

__Martha MacCallum__

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.

__Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Yeshiva University__

‘one of America’s rising conservative intellectuals. Ahmari’s new book, The Unbroken Thread, is a vital and provocative read…studded with little gems of historical and philosophical intrigue… the questions at the heart of this book about the nature of freedom and the value of tradition are increasingly urgent.’

__The Sunday Telegraph__

‘Sohrab Ahmari introduces a generation (and more) to the spiritual patrimony of which they have been robbed. And he does it in the gentlest way possible.’

__The Spectator__

‘ It earns notice… as a telling specimen of significant opinion on the American right.’

__New York Times__

An antidote to the chaos of the world right now, New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari turns to the past for guiding principles to steer society in a more moral direction.

__Sohrab Ahmari__ is the op-ed editor of the New York Post and a contributing editor of the Catholic Herald. Previously, he served as a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London, and as senior writer at Commentary magazine. In addition to those outlets, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Weekly Standard, First Things, Dissent and America. He has testified before the British Parliament and appears regularly on broadcast media on both sides of the Atlantic, including the BBC, Sky News, France 24, Deutsche Welle, EWTN, and Fox News.

Unbroken Thread

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