We named our firstborn after Maximilian Kolbe, because naming one’s children after saints is what Roman Catholics do. We believe doing so wins the newborn the patronage of the saint in heaven. But there was more to it than that: I picked the name, with his mother’s assent, to bind my own Max to the absolute ideals that stretch backward from Kolbe’s sacrifice, through the whole Western tradition, all the way to the Gospels and the Hebrew Bible. The name was to my mind a sort of thread, tying my progeny to tradition.
–Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos,
