"Hallelujah," From Messiah

High school student as silent monks. Watch the little guy on the far right.
Hat tip to Daphne Layland

Why Libya But Not Syria?

In Syria, we'd probably lose.

"Get in Line," Ron Sexsmith

NPR is a showcase for great new music. Its music app is the best thing you can get for your iPhone. Just this morning it introduced me to Canadian songwriter Ron Sexsmith's new album, "Long Player Late Bloomer," whose first song, above, will go down as one of the great codependency anthems, and God knows we need more of those. I also learned about two choir members from Brooklyn who started a band called the Sweetback Sisters. Their smoking 2009 album is "Chicken Ain't Chicken."

Even Better Than A See's Chocolate Bunny

Since I started blogging again in August, 80,000 page views as of 9:07 a.m. on the Monday in Easter week. Thanks, readers!

The Sheer Logic Of Agnosticism

A moving appeal by novelist Martin Amis to his ailing friend, polemicist Christopher Hitchens:

My dear Hitch: there has been much wild talk, among the believers, about your impending embrace of the sacred and the supernatural. This is of course insane. But I still hope to convert you, by sheer force of zealotry, to my own persuasion: agnosticism. In your seminal book, God Is Not Great, you put very little distance between the agnostic and the atheist; and what divides you and me (to quote Nabokov yet again) is a rut that any frog could straddle. "The measure of an education," you write elsewhere, "is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance." And that's all that "agnosticism" really means: it is an acknowledgment of ignorance. Such a fractional shift (and I know you won't make it) would seem to me consonant with your character – with your acceptance of inconsistencies and contradictions, with your intellectual romanticism, and with your love of life, which I have come to regard as superior to my own.

The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation – to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the multiverse. The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself to be an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a "higher intelligence" – because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it.

Hat tip to Hugh Hewitt

Love. Just Love.

Alex Knapp on the most subversive ideas in the Bible.

37 Felt Strongly About This

When Nixon stuck up for Deep Throat.

Redemption And Revenge

Historian Maarja Krusten reviews the recent Nixon wars.

The Great Post-Feast Of Easter

After Easter services, we go to brunch at El Adobe in San Juan Capistrano. Daughters Lindsay and Valerie are flanking Valerie's boyfriend, Mark. Below is Kathy's son, Dan, teaching a family friend, 20-month-old Eilee, how to play air mariachi guitar.

"The Rising," Springsteen & the E Street Band

An Easter hymn about Sept. 11. "May your precious blood bind me, Lord, as I stand before your fiery light." The St. John's folk circle will attempt the song at the May 7 women's brunch.
Hat tip to Paul Arndt (who will pay the guitar solo)