The incomparable Jim Dwyer said everything that needed to be said on the tenth anniversary."Climb the ladder of years, and the view from a decade up is startling. On the near ground, you can see the rubble and loss of war in a place where we had no quarrels that could not have been managed otherwise. In the distance, you can take in the earliest response to 9/11, by men and women who helped one another that morning, who used their last calls to speak of gratitude and love."With a single glance across time, you behold the profane and the sacred in all their contrapuntal power."Read the whole thing: NYTimes, September 8.

Margaret O’Brien Steinfels is a former editor of Commonweal. 

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