Moments of crisis dissolve our ordinary comforts and reveal our true nature. The Greek historian Thucydides documented how the 5th century BC plague of Athens led the Athenians to licentiousness and a hubristic disregard for all law. Pavlos Papadopoulos, writing in Law and Liberty, suggests that like the Athenians, we are forced by our own pandemic to confront our culture’s less savoury aspects.

When the Waves Turn the Minutes to Hours
John R. Grove commemorates the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald with a moving meditation on Gordon Lightfoot’s song memorializing the disaster and its 29 forever-lost victims. Lightfoot’s poetry and melody in The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald not only hauntingly convey the tragedy’s essential elements but, Grove writes in Law & Liberty, open a window to the sublime.


