Let the WTC Cross, found standing amidst the rubble, serve as a testimony of hope and redemption from that day to our own:
Memorial service, live streamed 8:40 AM Eastern:
As we face our own existential struggle today in the face of a Red Guards colour insurgency that appeals to our pain and shame but only threatens to revert to ideological, oligarchic tyranny . . .
a reminder:
. . . let us reflect on that cross and the faith once for all delivered unto the saints it symbolises.
For, we are again at kairos as a civilisation. END
PS: As an aid to reflection, I post a clip from Bernard lewis’ 1990 essay on the roots of Muslim rage in Atlantic magazine:
. . . The accusations are familiar. We of the West are accused of sexism, racism, and imperialism, institutionalized in patriarchy and slavery, tyranny and exploitation. To these charges, and to others as heinous, we have no option but to plead guilty — not as Americans, nor yet as Westerners, but simply as human beings, as members of the human race. In none of these sins are we the only sinners, and in some of them we are very far from being the worst. The treatment of women in the Western world, and more generally in Christendom, has always been unequal and often oppressive, but even at its worst it was rather better than the rule of polygamy and concubinage that has otherwise been the almost universal lot of womankind on this planet . . . .
In having practiced sexism, racism, and imperialism, the West was merely following the common practice of mankind through the millennia of recorded history. Where it is distinct from all other civilizations is in having recognized, named, and tried, not entirely without success, to remedy these historic diseases. And that is surely a matter for congratulation, not condemnation. We do not hold Western medical science in general, or Dr. Parkinson and Dr. Alzheimer in particular, responsible for the diseases they diagnosed and to which they gave their names.