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By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged
Clemente Lisi was a 26-year-old general assignment reporter for the New York Post on Sept. 11, 2001.
“Every day you’d get up, and you didn’t know what you were gonna do,” Lisi, now Religion Unplugged’s executive editor, told me last year. “One day it was covering a fire. The next day you’re covering a murder.”
On that Tuesday, he was told that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
“So I went downtown, and I got pretty close to the scene, but the subways were all backed up,” Lisi recalled. “So I started walking, not knowing that one tower had already collapsed, because we lived in a world where the cell phone wasn’t a thing yet.
“And I didn’t know what was happening,” he added. “And the second tower collapsed, and I was pretty close to that, and I had to basically run away — run for my life. And I was locked down in Manhattan all that day, all that night, interviewing people.
“And then I was there, basically, for three more months in Lower Manhattan, talking to people about what had happened.”
At the 25th anniversary of the nation’s worst terrorist attacks, Lisi explains for Religion Unplugged readers how the world that made 9/11 still casts a shadow.
This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.
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