Smart Pop Classics: Love Saves the World

In the Smart Pop Classics series, we share greatest hits from our throwback essay collections. In “Love Saves the World” from Seven Seasons of Buffy , Jean Lorrah argues that the love shared by Buffy, Xander, Willow, and Giles is real and lasting, and constitutes a family more stable and loving than most blood families. And how, at the end of season six, their love saves the world.

There is only one thing on Earth more powerful than evil, and that’s us,” Buffy Summers says at the end of “Bring on...