The Unbroken Thread by Sohrab Ahmari

Holy moly, what a great book!

Sohrab Ahmari wrote this book for his 2-year-old son, Max, after he began worrying about what sort of man Max would become when formed by our modern culture. Max is named for Maximilian Kolbe, a great saint of the 20th century. Ahmari thought about the gap between our cultural expectations and the culture that led Kolbe to to lay down his life for a man he didn't know. He wanted to bridge the gap between those two different cultures using the "unbroken thread" of tradition — both Tradition as Catholics would know it and tradition from other cultures such as from someone like Confucius.

He begins with the premise that the great traditions offer answers to questions that liberal modernity doesn't even begin to ask. Therefore, Ahmari asks twelve questions, each of which he explores through the life of different great thinkers from across the political and ideological spectrum. The style is kept very readable as it encompasses both story telling and intellectual thinking.

For example, his first question is "how do you justify your life?" What is at the bottom of that question is  modern scientism which says that everything must be measurable through cold, hard facts. The great thinker he uses to help examine this concept is C.S. Lewis.  First we are given a mini-biography so that the context of Lewis's thinking is clear. The place that Ahmari finds Lewis's thinking on science is in the first book of his science fiction trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet.

Some of the thinkers were those I'd heard a lot about, such as St. Thomas Aquinas. However, Ahmari also included people I'd never heard of like anthropologists Edith and Victor Turner. And there were plenty of in-betweens where the most I knew was a vague sense of their contributions, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It got to the point where I was excited to begin a new chapter to see what thinker was going to be highlighted.

I felt lucky to begin the book on a fairly open weekend so I finished it in two days. It was exciting and satisfying to read. And I was surprised to find myself moved in one spot where a teacher asked a former student, "May I hope that's the second volume of your Gnosticism book?" You'll have to read it yourself to see why that matters.

I really appreciated that Ahmari included people who are not 100% in lockstep with traditional Catholic teachings. It was enough that their basic premises showed logical thinking and that "unbroken thread" from past to present. That in itself is an important lesson to the modern reader in how to discern when someone has the big idea but may go astray on smaller details. He's not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

The others in my household are eagerly waiting their turn before this goes back to the library. Needless to say, I will be buying my own copy for rereading. Highly recommended.