Sohrab Ahmari, founder and editor of Compact and a contributing writer for The New Statesman, will speak at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy as part of the Interfaith Lecture Series and its Week Five theme, “Spiritual Grounding for Social Change.”
Compact magazine, founded in 2022, promotes economic thought inspired by Catholic social teaching. In an interview with La Croix International, the global version of the daily French general-interest Catholic newspaper, Ahmari said that “hierarchies are supposed to contribute to the good of the whole,” in close adherence to the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church.
This, he said, is essential for accessing the spiritual life — a spiritual search “needs a temporal foundation, and it needs to be guaranteed both “materially and socially.”
“Many people in America, who belong to the upper middle class, feel they have a truly rich spiritual life,” he said. “But they do not understand that people who live without this comfort do not have the conditions to access the same spiritual life.”
The La Croix article noted how, drawing inspiration from the writings of Aristotle, Ahmari thinks the pursuit of the common good should be at the center of political life.
Prior to Compact, Ahmari spent almost 10 years at News Corp., as op-ed editor of the New York Post and as a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London.
He’s also a contributing editor for The American Conservative, and the author of The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos and Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It.
