Fr. Maximilian Kolbe OFM Conv. in 1936 (Public Domain)
In 2017, I was 31 and living in Kensington, working as an editor at London Bridge, partying in Paris on my weekends, and it felt as if the whole modern, liberal order was tailor made for me. As a teenager, I had made my way from Iran to the United States, to a trailer park in a small university town. From there, I had been catapulted to the world of opinion journalism in New York and was soon transferred to London.
And yet I felt racked by an overwhelming anxiety: the anxiety of fatherhood. An immigrant isn’t supposed to complain about the society that gave him refuge. That is what I am: an immigrant, a radically assimilated one at that – who nonetheless harbours fundamental doubts about the society that gave him refuge.
