Sohrab Ahmari and Michael Brendan Dougherty on Reclaiming Faith, Family, and Nation

“In an age of iconoclasm, Ahmari reiterates the indispensable need for the icon of tradition that points beyond itself to the everlasting, and Dougherty captures how the icon of national particularism can also point beyond itself to the universal.”

Sohrab Ahmari’s The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos and Michael Brendan Dougherty’s My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home are ostensibly about different subjects: tradition as guide and Ireland as a spiritual and ancestral home. These two books are bound by their contrasts. They each converge on their diagnosis of what ails us in this time of late modernity. In their particular ways, they come together on what might act as a salve to our sense of loss in a world we navigate as wanderers without a destination or home to which we can return.

Our modern culture is geared, more perfectly than any other, to not only not answering our deepest questions, but denying such questions are legitimate. These existential questions include “Who am I?” “What is my place in this world?” “Where is home?” These questions constitute our search for meaning. The questions are universal; the answers are particular. Liquid modernity dissolves all solid structures and ties that could orient us towards answers that might ease the pain of an unnamed longing so many feel but cannot express.

This is the point of Ahmari’s book: to ask 12 questions believed irrelevant by our modern, Western societies. These questions are asked in order to guide his own son, Max, short for Maximillian. The Maximillian this young Max is named for is the Catholic priest Maximilian Kolbe, anti-Nazi and Auschwitz inmate condemned to death. Kolbe gave himself willingly as an act of martyrdom, hallowing himself and his fellow prisoners with his sacrifice, and gaining a “strange yet perfect form of freedom” through “intense spiritual resolve.” This kind of courage born of grace through love is almost impossible to imagine in these comfortable days of materialistic attainment and utilitarian gain.