I am just writing a piece about Maureen Dowd that begins with a quotation from William Hazlitt: “Those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.”  La Dowd exemplifies the melancholy truth of Hazlitt’s observations in her girly, gossipy prose that brings the cattiest of sorority nastiness to the august pages of a once-serious newspaper.  It’s the disjunction that causes the frisson: you’re expecting some sort of serious analysis or opinionating and what you get instead is this painful smart-ass calling people names and calling attention to herself like a poorly brought-up, pubescent brat who recently discovered that her sex could be deployed as a weapon as well as an excuse.

But let me leave Maureen Dowd for later on.  Now I want to remark on the wide application of Hazlitt’s principle: “Those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” You can, I’m sure, think of plenty of examples.  Here’s one. My friend Kevin Williamson, a writer for National Review, author (most recently) of The End is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome, and theater critic for the magazine I edit, The New Criterion, got tossed out of a theater last night.  Why? Because Hazlitt’s principle was working overtime.  Let Kevin explain:

The show was Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, which was quite good and which I recommend. The audience, on the other hand, was horrible — talking, using their phones, and making a general nuisance of themselves. It was bad enough that I seriously considered leaving during the intermission, something I’ve not done before. The main offenders were two parties of women of a certain age, the sad sort with too much makeup and too-high heels, and insufficient attention span for following a two-hour musical. But my date spoke with the theater management during the intermission, and they apologetically assured us that the situation would be remedied.

The situation was not remedied.  On the contrary, “The lady seated to my immediate right (very close quarters on bench seating) was fairly insistent about using her phone. I asked her to turn it off. She answered: “So don’t look.” I asked her whether I had missed something during the very pointed announcements to please turn off your phones, perhaps a special exemption granted for her. She suggested that I should mind my own business.

This is where things got interesting.

So I minded my own business by utilizing my famously feline agility to deftly snatch the phone out of her hand and toss it across the room, where it would do no more damage. She slapped me and stormed away to seek managerial succor. Eventually, I was visited by a black-suited agent of order, who asked whether he might have a word.

Kevin wondered, as I would have done, whether management had come over to give him a pat on the back and congratulate him on dealing effectively with a public nuisance.  I hope you will be as shocked as I was to learn that instead, he got the boot. There is, Kevin concluded, “talk of criminal charges.” I assume, but do not know, that he means he is contemplating suing the female in question, the theater, or both. It’s been suggested to me that, on the contrary, the possible charges might be directed at Kevin.That, I suppose, is possible, but only because William Hazlitt, with his laser-like insight, saw deeply into the heart of human folly.

*****

Cross-posted at PJ Lifestyle.

So, Andy McCarthy reports on the Pew Research Center’s survey on “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics, and Society.” The world’s Muslims, mind you. That’s a capacious group.  The bottom line: things are not so bad, really. Yes, two thirds of those interviewed support the death penalty — the death penalty, Kemo Sabe — for apostasy from Islam. But only one third support  suicide bombings. Yay! And the main take-away is that Muslims’ views about sharia, i.e., Islamic law,  should calm the nerves of Islamophobic neanderthals like, er, well, like me.  Sure, those interviewed overwhelmingly support the imposition of sharia, but sharia, we are  told in the best lullaby tone, is not so bad. “Unlike codified Western law,” you see, “sharia is a loosely defined set of moral and legal guidelines based on the Koran, the sayings of Prophet Mohammad (hadith) and Muslim traditions. Its rules and advice cover everything from prayers to personal hygiene.”

“Prayers to personal hygiene.” Let’s see, what does that leave out? Oh, right. Jihad!  Remember jihad?   The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamist front group charged with putting the smily faces on the activities of their Muslim brethren, has waged a risible PR effort to convince people that jihad has more to do with achieving your personal best than with blowing things up. But no sane person believes that. “Jihad” is what the boys in Boston were up to a few weeks ago shen they detonated those pressure-cooker bombs, murdering and maiming scores.

But the “see-no-evil,” “let’s-not-be-beastly-to-the-Muslims” song that the Pew’s report attempts to sing is not the only thing wrong with it.  There is also the “huge” flaw that McCarthy notes. This world-wide survey of Muslims is not world wide. It leaves out one or two spots. Saudi Arabia, for example. And Iran. And India. And China. And the Sudan. Etc.  In other words, this survey of Muslim attitudes leaves out some of the most toxic Muslim countries.  What sort of survey is that?

Perhaps the only thing in this story more preposterous than the survey itself is the response to McCarthy’s critical post by James Bell, director of international survey research for the Pew Research Center. Mr. Bell complains that McCarthy didn’t appreciate Pew’s good efforts. Countries like Saudia Arabia, Iran, an the Sudan were left out of the survey not because of “any lack of desire on our part. We wanted very much to survey in these countries, and we regret that we were unable to do so.” Oh. I see. And why was that? Well, because “we were unable to conduct surveys in some places with large Muslim populations — including India and China as well as Saudi Arabia — where political sensitivities or security concerns prevented opinion research among Muslims.” Ah.

Well, that’s all right then. But again, why was that? “In some situations, asking questions about religious beliefs and practices can make people suspicious, agitated, even hostile. We were advised that in parts of India, for example, asking people about their religious identity might be seen as stoking communal tensions — and this, in turn, could put the safety of interviewers at risk.”

Whoa. “Could put the safety of the interviewers at risk”? What sort of place would that be? Possibly, just possibly, a barbaric Islamic hell-hole where people cannot hear the word “survey” without reaching for the scimitar (or modern equivalent)?

What Mr. Bell has really said is that his survey is totally worthless, a complete waste of time and money. Actually, it’s worse.  By providing a distorted and untruthful picture of Islam it lulls its target audience—we gullible rubes in the West who are always on the lookout for some reason  to accommodate and compromise (not to say capitulate).

One knowledge commentator described James Bell’s response as “laughable.” It is that.  But in its shameless mendacity it is contemptible as well.

Gertrude Stein once asked: “What do writers want?”  Her heartfelt answer (this was one thing she really knew about): “Praise, praise, praise.”  Truer words, etc., etc. I’ve had occasion to ponder the fathomless vanity of writers recently. I won’t go into the particulars, except to say that   it is an untidy subject, mournful and painfully comic by turns.  You thought you knew someone quite well and, bang, you discover a yawning, unsatisfied narcissism that follows him around like a doppelgänger. The discovery is rarely pleasant.  That’s the thing about vanity: it’s almost never unencumbered.  Even in its most chanticleer-like boastfulness, a writer’s vanity is only a half step away from that curdled variation, wounded vanity, and we all know what that is like.

But enough about vanity. What I really want to talk about today is me. Or rather, I want to invite you to listen to National Review’s Jay Nordlinger talk about me.  This past Monday evening, I was at an event at which a friend asked if I had seen Jay’s review of my book The Fortunes of Permanence.  I hadn’t.  I somehow forbore to look it up until I got home.  It was worth the wait. What I discovered was not one but two pieces by Jay about the book, and more was on the way.  The series ended this morning with part 5.  What can I say?  Jay is a writer I greatly admire. He is the chief music critic for the magazine I edit, The New Criterion. I published his incisive book about the Nobel Peace Prize, Peace, They Say, last year at Encounter Books. And here he was meditating at stupendous and gratifying length on my latest effusion. Gosh.

My friend the other night described Jay’s performance as a “review.”  But it’s much more, something quite other, than a review.  “Appreciation” comes closer, but that’s not quite right either. As every writer knows, even the most positive review has something alien about it.  Praise is all well and good, but there is generally something external about a review.  Even when the description is accurate, it’s by an outsider looking in.  What Jay has managed in these five essays is to inhabit a book. It’s a bravura performance, gratifying not (well, not only) because of its praise but because of its uncanny familiarity. My birthday is a few months off but Jay’s series on The Fortunes of Permanence certainly puts me in festive spirit.  You’ll see why when you leaf through them. Start with part one and continue on here, here, here, and here.

. . .  comes from the New York Times.  “Professors at San Jose State Criticize Online Courses.” Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Someone told me the story that Larry Ellison, genius loci of Oracle Corporation, was slumming recently. He was, the story goes, giving a talk at a big meeting of the American Association of University Professors, the guild organization that invigilates the protectionist rules that keep the professoriate in their tenured luxury.  Ellison began with a little flattery. Teachers, he said, are one of the most important assets of our society. Applause and appreciative murmurs.  Not only are teachers important, he said they are also drastically underpaid. Even more appreciative applause and scattered “Here, heres.” In fact, quoth this business giant, I think teachers are so important that they ought to be paid at least a $1 million a year. A standing ovation: who knew that someone from corporate America could be so  insightful?  Unfortunately, Ellison concluded, I’m only going to need about 100 of you. A shocked silence greeted that announcement. Whatever could he mean, wondered the assembled multitude as they looked about at the teeming mass of pseudo-independent thinkers that filled the room.  Whatever could could he mean?

We all know what he meant.  The technological tsunami that is online education is poised to rip through the educational status quo, performing for that fetid redoubt a service similar to that performed by Hercules for Augeas, he of the largest and untidy stables.

But what’s funny about the Times’s story is not so much the state of denial exhibited by the faculty at that educational backwater in California (San Jose State?), but the reasons given for their criticism. “The philosophy department,” the Times reports,  “sent Dr. Sandel [a prominent Harvard prof. whose course is being offered free and for nothing online] an open letter asserting that such courses, designed by elite universities and widely licensed by others, would compromise the quality of education, stifle diverse viewpoints and lead to the dismantling of public universities.”  Italics are mine.  Online courses are dangerous because they would “compromise the quality of education” and “stifle diverse viewpoints.”  Ha, ha, ha. As if “the quality of education” and genuine diversity were features of most colleges and universities these days.  No, as the recent report from the National Association of Scholars about  Bowdoin College has shown, the American educational establishment, despite its constant talk about diversity, is a stunningly conformist and intellectually un-diverse environment.

Fear. Horror. Disgust. For me, that melancholy trinity defines the response to latest act of Islamic terrorism on U.S. soil, the hideous bombings at the Boston Marathon just over a week ago that left 3 dead and more than 260 injured (at least 15 were in critical condition).

Let’s start with the horror.

Martin Richard, age 8, was near the finish line watching the race with his family when one of the bombs detonated. He was killed by the blast, which riddled his body with shrapnel. His younger sister Jane lost a leg. That’s easy to say, isn’t it? “Lost a leg.” Sounds like “lost my glasses” or “lost my wallet.” But there’s this difference: you left your glasses behind a book on the nightstand. In Boston, a young girl had her leg blown off by two Islamic terrorists. And then there was Mrs. Richard. She was standing right next to the bomb and suffered a traumatic brain injury from the blast. That story can be told many times over. At least 14 people lost all or part of a limb, several of them more than one.

Horror is probably the central element of most terrorist attacks. How could it be otherwise? Terrorist attacks by definition target the innocent. A bunch of spectators at a marathon in Boston on an early spring day. What have any of them done to the bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? Nothing. The destruction of those innocent lives is a brute, unassimilable horror that must forever exist outside the quotidian realities of everyday life.

But horror, although it is a central element in this barbaric episode, is not the only relevant emotion. There is also disgust. For me, disgust (fortified by a healthy dollop of contempt) is my prevailing response to what the hand-wringing, left-wing sentimentalists have to say about the Boston bombings, and especially what they have to say about the bombers themselves. I’ve already written about David Sirota’s emetic essay in Slate in which he expressed the hope that the bomber would turn our to be a “white American” while also dilating on the sin of “white male privilege.” The politically correct consensus has been bleating in perfect unison on this subject. First came the prediction and the fervent, trembling hope — the unspeakable yearning — that the perpetrator of this slaughter would turn out to be a tea partier, an anti-government right-winger, or at least a white male Christian of some description.

One of the curious, but also most predictable, responses to the Boston Marathon bombings from the Left has been the fervent expression — amounting nearly to a prayer — that the perpetrator or perpetrators of this act of mass murder be “homegrown,” preferably white, male, Christian, and conservative.

Why? Why does the Left prefer to have its terrorism served up by Timothy McVeigh rather than Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad? It’s an interesting question. That the Left exhibits this prejudice is, like Falstaff’s dishonesty, “gross as a mountain, open, palpable.”

David Sirota, writing at Salon, gives almost comic expression to the genre in an essay with the really special title “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” Why does Mr. Sirota wish that the Boston murderer of 8-year-old boys be a white American? Because a spectral quality called “white male privilege” operates insidiously behind the scenes. If Timmy McVeigh blows up a government building, says Mr. Sirota, only he is blamed. If Mohammed does it, Muslims are likely to be “collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse).”

What do you think of that argument? I think it’s hooey. For one thing, categories like “white male privilege” are a sort of Leftist version of phlogiston: hypothetical explanatory devices that have the unfortunate attribute of not actually existing. For another, there’s plenty of “collective slander” of Christian fundamentalists (you know, those “bitter” small-towners who “cling to guns or  religion”) going around.

A full anatomy of David Sirota’s hope for a great white villain would fill many pages. What I want to note at the moment, however, is how consonant it is with President Obama’s often noted reluctance to employ what Andrew McCarthy calls the “T-word” when commenting on episodes of mayhem and murder.

He doesn’t want to say “terrorism” when bombs go off and people die because, well, because people these days have an inexplicable tendency to think “Muslim outrage” when bombs explode and innocent people are maimed or murdered.

It is very odd. Most people are just not as Hume-ian as the president when it comes to discerning a link between “A” and “B.”  Hume famously attacked the idea of causation, pointing out that just because “B” regularly has happened after “A” does not mean that “A” causes “B.” There might be a conjunction, Hume allowed, but to speak of causation is to speak presumptuously.

Logically, Hume had a point. But when it comes to what actually happens in the world, most people are, and rightly are, very imperfect Hume-ians. They observe connections. Then they draw conclusions. They observe (to take just a few recent examples):

• the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing in Saudi Arabia, perpetrated by the Islamic Jihad Organization (63 dead, 120 wounded).
• the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, masterminded by Razmi Yousef (6 dead, 1000 wounded).
• the 1993 Bombay bombings, perpetrated by “underworld criminal groups affiliated with Islamic groups” (257 dead, 713 wounded).
• the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, courtesy of Hezbollah (20 dead, 372 wounded).
• the 1997 Luxor attack, perpetrated by pals of the conspirators of the first World Trade Center bombing (62 killed and mutilated, 26 injured).
• the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, brought to you by Osama bin Laden and friends (223 dead, 4000+ wounded).
• the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, more friends of Osama bin Laden (17 American sailors killed, 39 injured).
• the destruction of the World Trade Towers and attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001: you know all about that (nearly 3000 dead).
• the 2002 bombing of a Bali nightclub, perpetrated by al Qaeda and affiliates  (202 killed, 300 injured).
• the July 2005 London bombings, perpetrated by “four Islamist home-grown terrorists” (52 killed, 700 injured).
• the 2009 Fort Hood shootings, sole suspect, Nidal Malik Hasan (13 dead, 30 injured).
• et very much cetera.

People (but not people like David Sirota or Barack Obama) observe these events and they draw conclusions. Not all Muslims are terrorists, but these days, if you are a terrorist odds are pretty good you are a Muslim.

Not much.  Yesterday, Drudge brief reported that there were twelve dead. At the moment, he quotes “cops” who in a continuously updated WaPo report say there are two three dead, 23 injured. Boston.com says there are three dead and 140 wounded. But the two W-questions: who? why?  Remain totally unanswered. Early on, there were reports that the massacre was the work of a deranged right-winger, unhappy about tax-day, etc. One tweet:  “my first thought was all these anti-gov groups, but who knows.” Who indeed?  Later on “a Saudi” was fingered.  According  to a CBS report, a Saudi man near the event was chased and tackled by bystanders and is currently in custody. “A civilian who thought he was acting suspiciously chased him down and tackled him and then turned him over to Boston police, saying, I saw this guy hanging around over there acting suspiciously. And then he ran. That may mean a lot, it may mean nothing at all.”

So there, at the moment, is where we are. In the dark.  Glenn Reynolds had the best advice: “Based on past experience, at least half of what you’re hearing about Boston this afternoon will turn out to be wrong by tomorrow. And journalists/pundits: Try not to speculate in the absence of data. You don’t know anything either.”

Last year around this time, I wrote here about the Blue Hill Troupe’s superlative performance of Gilbert & Sullivan’s late, seldom-staged operetta “Utopia, Limited” at the Museo del Barrio in New York. 

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending en famille a matinée of one of G&S’s most popular works (and my personal favorite) “The Mikado” (1885). What a treat!

The theater at the Museo del Barrio is an under-appreciated gem.  It opened in 1922 as the Heckscher Theatre, a 600-seat performance space on 5th Avenue at 104th Street.  Featuring splendid murals by Willy Pogáni illustrating such children’s classics as Jack and the Beanstalk, Hansel and Gretel, and Cinderella, the theater was originally built to offer free performances for orphans and other poor children.

The space has a long history with the Blue Hill Troupe, whose annual spring performances are devoted to staging Gilbert & Sullivan. (In the autumn, the company does another family comedy: next up, in November, “The Drowsy Chaperone.”) The mostly amateur company, whose net proceeds support a wide range of charitable causes (they’ve raised some $4 million to date), began life in 1924 as a summer lark among four families in Maine. (Its first performance, of HMS Pinafore, took place on Alida and Seth Milliken’s yacht in Bluehill.)  Within a few years the company had moved to New York. Its first New York productions—if “productions” isn’t too grand a term—were in the hallway of the Milliken’s residence at 74th and Madison (on the site, I regret to say, of the Whitney Museum).

So popular were the performances that the company was soon looking abroad for a proper theater. The Heckscher Theatre was a natural. Their first performance there: “The Mikado” in 1928.

I fell in love with Gilbert & Sullivan directly I encountered their work. I was delighted by Gilbert’s clever, ebullient word-play, sharp but never cynical, and I’ve always thought Sullivan’s genius for lively appropriation and narrative pastiche has been unfairly slighted. To me, the amazing thing is that these sophisticated operettas were among the brightest gems in the diadem of Victorian popular entertainment. Popular, mind you.  What the masses snapped up and savored. It’s a far cry from the psychopathological inanities purveyed as popular entertainment by television these days.

But I digress.  I have seen, gosh, many performances of “The Mikado.”  This was easily one of the very best. The BHT is so popular with singers that it supports two separate casts.  I saw the “closing cast” yesterday, and it was uniformly superb.  Sure, I have a few quibbles, but I am not going to air them because the overall excellence of the production dwarfs them into carping irrelevance.  Ko-Ko (Michael Macaione) was brilliant: the best and most inventive rendition of that charming character I’ve witnessed. Ditto Nanki-Poo (Richard Miller), an inveigling, powerful tenor whose acting neatly complements the mellow sumptuousness of his voice.  Pooh-Bah (Kevin Murray) was hilarious as the haughty Lord High Everything Else, a sneering swell who traces his ancestry back to a “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.”

The delectable Sheena Ramirez was smashing as Yum-Yum: a knockout in every respect.  I am a great fan of Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh’s film about the making of “The Mikado,” but Ramirez far outshines in looks and voice that fetching Yum-Yum. Another of the show’s great triumphs was Cristiane Young as the formidable Katisha: what a presence! And what a voice!  When the cowed Ko-Ko, wooing her in order to save himself from a dreadful fate (“something lingering,” mused the Mikado, not quite certain what the law prescribed, but something “humorous” like boiling oil or molten lead)—when, I say,  Ko-Ko asks if Katisha thinks she is “sufficiently decayed,” her virtuoso coloratura response (can an alto do coloratura?) brought the house down: “To the matter that you mention/ I have given some attention,/ and I think I am sufficiently decay-ayed,” that final word lasting about thirty seconds and sliding inexorably upward.

The show, in short, is a triumph.  And just think: I am writing this on Sunday morning, April 14. You, Dear Reader, may possibly be getting outside your second cup of coffee or your morning tisane about now.  If you are reading this, you are at your computer or your iPad. You, lucky thing, need only click here to book a ticket for April 17, 18, 19, or 20. I recommend, however, that you follow the advice of the poet Horace: carpe diem. Act now!  We had nearly a full house yesterday afternoon. News travels fast. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the run is sold out. I’d hate to think you missed it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I have been out of town in a semi-secure, undisclosed location and have not had occasion to weigh in on the death of Margaret Thatcher.  I happened to be with some close friends of hers when the news came, so I’ve been kept abreast of the currents of opinion.  Much of the commentary, as was fitting for so great and dynamic a political leader, has been celebratory and reverential. Margaret Thatcher was the woman who reclaimed Britain for itself, who put an end to the squalid deprivations of post-war austerity, and who with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, helped face down the hideous evil of Soviet Communism. (On this latter, see John O’Sullivan’s magisterial The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World.) She understood, as few other contemporary leaders have understood, the fructifying symbiotic relationship between free markets and free men.

It’s something that is beyond the ken of many beneficiaries of the mighty cornucopia of capitalism. This melancholy fact was instantly brought home to me by the outpouring of sweaty hatred from the mephitic swamps of leftist animus. Over at NRO, Andrew Johnson aggregated a few early specimens: “Thatcher is dead, but unfortunately Thatcherism lives on. Let’s bury it with her.” From George Galloway: “Tramp the dirt down.” Ted Rall: “Goodbye, Maggie, and good riddance. Along with Reagan, Thatcher destroyed the safety net and the social contract in the West.” Donna Brazile: “Okay, what did the #ironlady do to advance Great Britain and the world? Did she leave lasting footprints for women in politics?” Et very much cetera.

Such spiteful, squamous yammering was partly repellent, partly embarrassing. It was more than counterbalanced, however, but the cataract of grateful remembrance and insightful commentary from those who understood the dimensions of Thatcher’s benefactions. One of the best early commentaries was “Thatcher Was Right, the Left Was Wrong,” Kevin Williamson’s brief intervention, also at NRO. Kevin dilates particularly on Thatcher’s brilliant deployment of good humored intelligence in her many spirited clashes with her ideological opponents: “she seemed to be having so much fun,” Kevin noted.

That, I think, is what they never forgave her for. Thatcher laughed at them, mocked them, outwitted and out-debated them. That infuriated the Left: Conservatives aren’t supposed to mock, they are supposed to be mocked. They might be allowed to win a few elections, but they could never be allowed to win the argument, much less to scoff at liberals’ public pieties.

Thatcher won, in no small part because she was her own best case. Her confidence, prudence, good humor, and other virtues were those she sought to encourage in her fellow countrymen.

Dear friends (and others),

Here is a reposting of what has become my traditional thoughts on Easter:

Yesterday, Holy Saturday, was glorious, and I am happy to report that, though rain is threatened later in the day, Easter dawned bright and sunny here on the East coast of southern Connecticut.  Easter is early this year, but Spring is definitely here now: the snow drops are behind us and everywhere the purple-lavender  crowns of crocuses announce the season.  Clumps of forsythia are just beginning their yellow triumph by the roadside, and daffodils are set to trumpet the season any day.  Other buds and shoots are crowding in the wings: in just a week or two the  flowering cherries and pears will be bursting with blossoms. We are still in a rental house, courtesy Hurricane Sandy, but I walked around the apple tree outside my study window at home yesterday and was pleased to see it beginning to bedeck itself with thousands of tightly wrought green promises just waiting to blossom into a glory of white and pink. In short, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in “God’s Grandeur,” one of his most magnificent poems, although “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,” although “the soil is bare now,” yet “for all this nature is never spent.”

And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

I have loved Hopkins’s poem since I first read it in high school — the incantatory diction, haunting music, emotion compressed, distilled, stripped bare in language that trembles to contain all it seeks to impart (“there lives the dearest freshness deep down things”).

Easter, as I noted in a post marking the holiday last year,  is the traditional time when the Catholic Church receives converts into the fold. I went back to read what I’d written a couple of Easters ago and thought some readers might like to be reminded of what I had to say then:

All souls are equal in the sight of God, but here on earth some converts elicit particular attention. The announcement yesterday that Magdi Allam, the 55-year-old an Egyptian-born Italian journalist, had converted from his native Islam to Catholic Christianity, is a case in point. Apostasy from Islam is, as my fellow PJM blogger Michael Ledeen points out, punishable by death if you happen to be in one of the many atavistic bulwarks of barbarism that make the Religion of Peace an object of obloquy among civilized people.

[UPDATE: Robert Spencer shows that, as usual, I was being too generous to the Religion of Peace. As Spencer explains, "all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that apostates must be executed. But don't take my word for it. Here's the great Sheikh Al-Qaradawi, who has been praised by John Esposito as a 'reformist':

That is why the Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished, yet they differ as to determining the kind of punishment to be inflicted upon them. The majority of them, including the four main schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi`i, and Hanbali) as well as the other four schools of jurisprudence (the four Shiite schools of Az-Zaidiyyah, Al-Ithna-`ashriyyah, Al-Ja`fariyyah, and Az-Zaheriyyah) agree that apostates must be executed...]

This particular baptism is sure to arouse the ire of fanatical Muslims, but, as the blogger at Tigerhawk put it, kudos to the Pope for performing the service in public: “If the Roman church does not draw a line against Islamist intimidation, who will?” [ANOTHER UPDATE: the story of Magdi Allam does not have an edifying ending.]

Good question. While you ponder it, allow me to introduce a more meditative note. Last year at Easter, I posted this thought for the day about the mysterious subject of time; a few people have asked me about it, so I thought I would reproduce it on this chilly (but sunny) Easter morn:

“So long as no one asks me,” St. Augustine says, reflecting on the mystery of time in Confessions, “I know what it is. But as soon as I try to say what time is I am baffled”

Well, St. Augustine has many interesting things to say about time in Book XI of Confessions, and he is perhaps most interesting (if also least helpful) when he wonders whether time is somehow “an extension of the mind itself” – most interesting because it is clear that our experience of time is deeply implicated with the movements of our mind, that it differs radically from one moment, and one phase of life to the next. But St. Augustine’s suggestion is also not particularly helpful when it comes to one of life’s most awful facts: that time passes, sweeping all that is “contains” (right word?) before it.

In a used book shop somewhere a couple of years ago I picked up a book enticingly called Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older. Published by Cambridge University Press, it’s by a Dutch psychologist called Douwe Draaisma, and it is full of interesting facts and speculations about (as the book’s subtitle puts it”) “how memory shapes our past.” (How indeed: “Memory,” Draasima quotes the Dutch aphorist Cees Nooteboom as saying, “is like a dog that lies down where it pleases.”)

Easter, whatever else it is, is a festival about time’s passing–taking that phrase in all the rich multiplicity implied in “passing.” (When time has passed, what is left?) Draasisma’s book presents lots of fascinating psychological case studies. Much briefer, yet unaccountably more poignant, is this little poem I discovered in one of John Julius Norwich’s Christmas Crackers. It is, he tells us, inscribed on the pendulum of a clock in a church in Kent.

When as a child I laughed and wept
Time crept.
When as a youth I dreamed and talked
Time walked.
When I became a full-grown man
Time ran.
And later as I older grew
Time flew.
Soon shall I find when traveling on
Time gone.
Will Christ have saved my soul by then?
Amen.

An apposite question for this Easter morning!

Also read: 

Google Celebrates Easter in their Own Special Way