But it [the aftermath of the tragedy on 9-11-2001] was also a great spiritual crisis, in which men and women who had perhaps been too otherwise engaged for soul searching found themselves blown by the explosion into the center of their own personal universe, forced into a face-to-face confrontation with mortality and meaning, the notion of God and the paradox of human existence, bounded on one side by great selflessness and on the other by mass destruction.
— Anna Quindlen, 9-11: Meditations at the Center of the World by Eugene Kennedy