Call number
248.246 AHM
Status
Available
Call number
Pages
225
Description
Sohrab Ahmari was a teenager living under the Iranian ayatollahs when he decided that there is no God. Nearly two decades later, he would be received into the Roman Catholic Church. In From Fire, by Water, he recounts this unlikely passage, from the strident Marxism and atheism of a youth misspent on both sides of the Atlantic to a moral and spiritual awakening prompted by the Mass. At once a young intellectual's finely crafted self-portrait and a life story at the intersection of the great ideas and events of our time, the book marks the debut of a compelling new Catholic voice.
Publication
Ignatius Press (2019), 225 pages
ISBN
162164202X / 9781621642022
Collections
User reviews
LibraryThing member judithrs
From Fire by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith. Sohrab Ahmari. 2019. I cannot get enough of conversion stories, and this is one of the better ones. The Forward by Archbishop Charles Chaput is almost worth the price of the book: “The truth is, we’re never as important as we think we are,
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and in the end our stories will be forgotten by everyone but God…And yet, God made us social creatures for a reason. In needing each other, in depending on each other, we have a chance to learn how to love as God loves…And Ahmari takes us on his personal journey from lukewarm Islam, through atheism and Marxism to an abiding faith in our Lord. He is led on this trip by the works of some of my favorite authors: Benedict XVI, St. Augustine, and John Richard Neuhaus, and Blessed John Henry Newman whom he quotes: “[Rome] alone…has given free scope to the feelings of awe, mystery, tenderness, reverence, devotedness, and other feelings which may be especially called Catholic.” The rest of his story is fascinating too. Ahmari’s family was a member of the intellectual/arty group, and they allowed him to become almost completely Americanized. His family sheltered him as much as possible from the cruelty and dictatorship of the ayatollahs, but it was still a culture shock to move to the United States when he was a teenager and ended up in a trailer park in the Mormon state of Utah. Show Less
LibraryThing member jeterat
A great conversion narrative clearly modeled on The Confessions, which the author discusses in the last chapter. A little preachy in parts and under developed, but a great two or three day contemplative read. Was happy to get this as a gift from a family member over Easter.