Reading The Rites of Spring, Modris Eksteins’ brilliant account of how the First World War destroyed European civilization, led Rod Dreher to ponder the meaning of 40 million unemployed Americans. Eksteins depicted how the Europeans failed to imagine the civilizational catastrophe that was upon them. Dreher, writing in The American Conservative, wonders if anyone can truly grasp the significance of the coronavirus pandemic.

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.


