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The Unbroken Thread, Ahmari, an editor at the
New York Post, defends traditional ways of thinking by asking pointed questions that reveal the deficiencies of our modern worldview. But the state of tradition is surely not “unbroken” it could be more accurately characterized as “hanging on by a thread.” The tenuous state of tradition makes it important to drag out the buried thesis of Ahmari’s book: We need a counterelite.
The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos, by Sohrab Ahmari. Convergent, 320 pp., $27.
The Unbroken Thread reminds us that everything worth conserving must be constantly reaffirmed. It begins with Ahmari’s admission of his wariness of what the West has become. “I have come to believe that the very modes of life and thinking that strike most people in the West as antiquated or limiting can liberate us, while the Western dream of autonomy and choice without limits is, in fact, a prison.” Ahmar
A Complaint Against Liberal Modernity, and a Solution: Faith
Credit.Chris Gash
By Edmund Fawcett
THE UNBROKEN THREAD
By Sohrab Ahmari
“The Unbroken Thread” is a partisan
cri de coeur about the liberal West’s moral bewilderment from which, Sohrab Ahmari tells us, conservative Catholicism offers safe rescue. It merits attention not for diagnostic sharpness or strong argument, of which more in a moment, but because Ahmari is a notable combatant in the fight on the American right for the future of conservatism. Is conservatism to be socially liberal or, as he prefers, a moral crusade against secular misunderstandings and misuses of freedom?
A Vision of Racial and Economic Justice
A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin knew the fate of the civil rights and labor movements were intertwined. The same is true today. Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, and John Morsell hold a press conference in 1963. (Library of Congress)
Norman Hill and Velma Murphy Hill began their careers in the civil rights movement in the late 1950s in Chicago, where they met and married. A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin acted as their mentors through every major event in the fight for civil rights. Below, the Hills reflect on the organizing principles that drove their mentors’ activism and struggle.Â
Can I Get a Witness? Thirteen Peacemakers, Community Builders and Agitators for Faith & Justice, edited by Charles Marsh, Shea Tuttle and Daniel P. Rhodes. William B. Eerdmans Publishing (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2019). 398 pp., $26.99.
GANDHI AND RACISM
Upright: Gandhi instilled courage in people to act irrespective of their social station - ISTOCK.COM×
The present arena of hatred against Gandhi is undermining a rich and complex history of anti-racial and anti-imperial struggles A High Court in Malawi, East Africa, recently stalled the construction of a statue of MK Gandhi on the ground that his statements proved he was racist and prejudiced against Black Africans Non-violent resistance was an active social force to transform the other through suffering and not retaliating transformation involved both the victim and oppressor Neither King nor Mandela wholly adopted the spiritual practices of Gandhi. But this precisely points to the creativity of the moment