Happy Easter!! Alleluia!! - Hymns

The Chinese Christians have many beautiful native hymns. An example is the music of an alleluia series, which is attached to the Chinese text of Psalm 112 ("Praise, O servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord").[56]

Alleluia, alleluia,
O joy to all creation!
Alleluia, alleluia,
The Lord comes forth in glory.

Alleluia, alleluia,
Come, greet the dawn!
Alleluia, alleluia,
The Lord comes forth in glory.

An Easter hymn in honor of the glorified body of the Risen Lord is this ancient Tyrolese song (Ist das der Leib, Herr Jesu Christ):

Is this thy body, risen Christ,
Which lay in death, all pale and torn?
O Christians come, both young and old,
To see the Lord on Easter morn!
Alleluia, alleluia.

From now through all eternity
This body shines in radiant glow,
More splendid than the noonday-sun:
It will remain forever so.
Alleluia, alleluia.

Thy glory, Christ, I cannot bear,
It is too great for eyes like mine;
No one on earth can live and see
The splendor of the Lord divine.
Alleluia, Alleluia.

Photo-Op: Graven Images - Bronte Sisters

Bookshelf

 | FRIDAY, MARCH 22, 2013

Photo-Op: Graven Images

The photographer Bill Brandt had a sense not just for the landscape of Britain but the culture it gave rise to. A photographic review of "Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light."

The photographer Bill Brandt had a sense not just for the landscape of Britain but the culture it gave rise to. A photographic review of "Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light."

Enlarge Image

Jon L. Stryker/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

London is filthy with plaques noting where some poet or novelist once lived. But what do we learn of 'Oliver Twist' or 'Nicholas Nickleby' from the house in which Dickens wrote them (48 Doughty Street)? In one of her first forays into journalism, Virginia Woolf pondered 'Great Men's Houses,' visiting the house (24 Cheyne Row) where Thomas and Jane Carlyle lived and concluding that it was a 'battlefield where daily, summer and winter, mistress and maid fought against dirt and cold for cleanliness and warmth.' The place told a great deal about a tense marriage but not much about literature. When photographer Bill Brandt began pondering 'Literary Britain' in the 1940s, it was the landscapes from which writers sprang that he sought. Brandt depicted Robert Louis Stevenson through the fog-bound turrets of Edinburgh Castle and George Crabbe via a lonely fisherman on Aldeburgh Beach. The churchyard at Haworth (above), where the Rev. Patrick Brontë was vicar, stands in for his death-haunted daughters. The dark, uneven memorials evoke a dank, harsh place where Jane Eyre and Lowood School, the Grange and Wuthering Heights, and the gossip-encouraging seclusion of Wildfell Hall were born. Brandt is celebrated in 'Shadow and Light' (Museum of Modern Art, 208 pages, $50), whose selections of works from books like 'The English at Home' (1936), 'A Night in London' (1938) and 'Camera in London' (1948) show his deep sense of the country. What might surprise is that Brandt was only half-English—born and raised in Hamburg, Germany. His art was a way to assert his preferred nationality. The book 'Literary Britain' (1951) showed that the nation's landscape fed more than the people; it fed an imagination. No one sees a place so clearly as the immigrant.

—The Editors

A version of this article appeared March 23, 2013, on page C8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Photo-Op: Graven Images.

Copyright 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Jewish Cemetery At Newport - Longfellow Poem

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,       Close by the street of this fair seaport town, Silent beside the never-silent waves,       At rest in all this moving up and down! The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep       Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath, While underneath these leafy tents they keep       The long, mysterious Exodus of Death. And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,       That pave with level flags their burial-place, Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down       And broken by Moses at the mountain's base. The very names recorded here are strange,       Of foreign accent, and of different climes; Alvares and Rivera interchange       With Abraham and Jacob of old times. "Blessed be God! for he created Death!"       The mourners said, "and Death is rest and peace;" Then added, in the certainty of faith,       "And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease." Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,       No Psalms of David now the silence break, No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue       In the grand dialect the Prophets spake. Gone are the living, but the dead remain,       And not neglected; for a hand unseen, Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,       Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green. How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,       What persecution, merciless and blind, Drove o'er the sea — that desert desolate —       These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind? They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,       Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire; Taught in the school of patience to endure       The life of anguish and the death of fire. All their lives long, with the unleavened bread       And bitter herbs of exile and its fears, The wasting famine of the heart they fed,       And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears. Anathema maranatha! was the cry       That rang from town to town, from street to street; At every gate the accursed Mordecai       Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet. Pride and humiliation hand in hand       Walked with them through the world where'er they went; Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,       And yet unshaken as the continent. For in the background figures vague and vast       Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime, And all the great traditions of the Past       They saw reflected in the coming time. And thus forever with reverted look       The mystic volume of the world they read, Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,       Till life became a Legend of the Dead. But ah! what once has been shall be no more!       The groaning earth in travail and in pain Brings forth its races, but does not restore,       And the dead nations never rise again.

NJ Debates Right To Die Bill = Death With Dignity Act

New Jersey proposal on right to die debated

Under the gaze of Karen Ann Quinlan who was at the center of a right-to-die case in New Jersey in 1975, panelists gather March 27, 2013 at Rutgers-Camden Law School to debate New Jersey's proposed Death With Dignity Act, which passed the NJ Assembly last month. ( CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer )

GALLERY: New Jersey proposal on right to die debated

Joelle Farrell, Inquirer Trenton Bureau

POSTED: Thursday, March 28, 2013, 5:41 AM

If a doctor tells a patient that he has six months to live, should that patient be legally permitted to end his life with pills?

Should those who have suffered life-altering injuries - like paralysis - or have a degenerative but not immediately terminal disease be afforded the same right to die?

And should doctors and nurses, who are tasked with saving lives, also be an active part of a person's death?

These were some of the questions raised at a panel discussion Wednesday night concerning a bill that could make New Jersey the third state to let terminally ill patients end their lives with medical assistance.

The bill's sponsor, Assemblyman John Burzichelli (D., Gloucester), said he hoped the forum, which drew about 60 people to Rutgers-Camden Law School, is the first of many.

"People seem to want to be in control of their circumstances, and they're looking to the law," he said. "Does the state law as presently structured adequately serve the people it governs? Should it change?"

Lawmakers favorably moved the bill, called the New Jersey Death With Dignity Act, from an Assembly committee last month. Burzichelli said he did not expect a vote in the full Assembly or Senate until after the fall elections. The current bill is modeled after laws in Washington and Oregon. A terminally ill adult given a prognosis of six months or less to live would have to request a lethal dose from his or her attending physician on two occasions, the second request coming at least 15 days after the first. A second doctor would also have to approve the request.

In addition, the patient would submit a written request signed by two witnesses who believe the person is "capable" and "acting voluntarily." At least one of the witnesses would be forbidden from having any family or medical connection to the patient or any stake in the patient's estate.

Only the dying person could administer the lethal dose, under the bill's current language, which led some at Wednesday's discussion to ask about those suffering from a disease like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative neuromuscular disease that causes a person to progressively lose the ability to move, speak, and breathe.

A person with ALS might not be able to self-administer a dose, which Burzichelli said bore further discussion.

"It may be that we may want to think about how we use the term terminaland how it relates to their ability to self-administer," Burzichelli said, adding that he had lost five friends to ALS.

Joseph F. Fennelly, a doctor who has practiced medicine for 50 years and spoke against the bill, said that doctors use palliative care and pain management to help those who are suffering and near death. He said that he had seen patients with advanced ALS ask doctors to help them die, and that doctors had responded by using heavy morphine doses to ease the person's death.

But what goes on in the "sacred" space between a well-acquainted doctor and patient should not be dictated by state government, he said. Some patients hardly know their doctors. Should a primary-care physician agree to help someone die in the course of a five-minute visit, he asked.

"Save lives and stamp out disease: It's a mantra," he said of the message drilled into the heads of physicians.

The bill does not force doctors to participate, said David Leven, an expert on advance directives and end-of-life policy. The bill would simply give people the option, one that many do not take. About one-third of those in Oregon and Washington who obtained lethal drug doses never took them, he said.

Kathleen M. Gialanella, a registered nurse and a lawyer who spoke against the bill, said she supported withholding care at the request of a patient or his family. But doctors and nurses should not cross the line into actively helping a person to die, she said.

She questioned whether it was fair to let a person with terminal cancer choose when he or she would die when a person who is paralyzed from the neck down, for example, would not receive the same right under the bill.

"With any law, you can have unintended consequences. You do have to be concerned about the expansion of these type of societal changes," she said.

Burzichelli said he was not ready to contemplate allowing lethal drug doses to anyone except those who met the terminally-ill criteria of the bill.

"We're not ready for that," he said. "That is a slippery slope that has been salted."

---

Contact Joelle Farrell at 856-779-3237, jfarrell@phillynews.com, or follow on Twitter at @joellefarrell.

Joelle FarrellInquirer Trenton Bureau

Doomsday Clock At 5 Minutes To Midnight!-(Bioweapons, Climate Change, Nuclear Weapons, Genetic Engineering Measure)

A  version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 16, 2013, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Deafness at Doomsday


-Yarek Waszul

---

January 15, 2013

Deafness at Doomsday

By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS

TEMPE, Ariz.

TO our great peril, the scientific community has had little success in recent years influencing policy on global security. Perhaps this is because the best scientists today are not directly responsible for the very weapons that threaten our safety, and are therefore no longer the high priests of destruction, to be consulted as oracles as they were after World War II.

The problems scientists confront today are actually much harder than they were at the dawn of the nuclear age, and their successes more heartily earned. This is why it is so distressing that even Stephen Hawking, perhaps the world’s most famous living scientist, gets more attention for his views on space aliens than his views on nuclear weapons.Scientists’ voices are crucial in the debates over the global challenges of climate change, nuclear proliferation and the potential creation of new and deadly pathogens. But unlike in the past, their voices aren’t being heard.

Indeed, it was Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, warning of the possibility that Hitler might develop a nuclear weapon, that quickly prompted the start of the Manhattan Project, the largest scientific wartime project in history. Then, in 1945, the same group of physicists who had created the atomic bomb founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to warn of the dangers of nuclear weapons, and to promote international cooperation to avoid nuclear war. As Einstein said in May 1946, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

The men who built the bomb had enormous prestige as the greatest physics minds of the time. They included Nobel laureates, past and future, like Hans A. Bethe, Richard P. Feynman, Enrico Fermi, Ernest O. Lawrence and Isidor Isaac Rabi.

In June 1946, for instance, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had helped lead the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M., argued that atomic energy should be placed under civilian rather than military control. Within two months President Harry S. Truman signed a law doing so, effective January 1947.

Today, nine nuclear states have stockpiled perhaps 20,000 nuclear weapons, many of which dwarf the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet proliferation is as alarming as ever, even though President Obama signed, and Congress ratified, the new strategic arms-reduction treaty in 2010. Iran’s nuclear program could lead to conflict. So could the animosity between India and Pakistan, which both have nuclear weapons.

The United States is complicit, because whatever our leaders may say, our actions suggest that we have no real intention to disarm. The United Nations adopted the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would ban countries from testing nuclear weapons, in 1996. But it has not come into force; the Senate rejected ratification in 1999, and while President Obama has promised to obtain ratification, he has not shown enough urgency in doing so.

What’s striking is that today’s version of the Manhattan Project scientists — not the weapons researchers at our maximum-security national laboratories, but distinguished scientific minds at our research universities and other national labs — provide advice that is routinely ignored.

Last year, the National Academy of Sciences published a report demonstrating that all the technical preconditions necessary for ratifying the United Nations treaty were in place. But this vital issue did not come up in the presidential campaign and is barely mentioned in Washington. Another study by the academy last year, on flaws in America’s costly ballistic missile defense program, has had little impact even as the Pentagon considers cuts in military spending.

I am co-chairman of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has supported the call for a world free of nuclear weapons — a vision backed by major foreign policy figures in both parties. But ideological biases have become so ingrained in Washington that scientific realities are subordinated to political intransigence.

Do scientists need to develop new doomsday tools before our views are again heard? Will climate researchers remain voiceless unless they propose untested geoengineering technologies that could have insidious consequences? Will biologists be heard only if their work spawns new biotechnologies that could be weaponized?

Because the threat of nuclear proliferation is not being addressed, because missile defense technologies remain flawed and because new threats exposed by scientists have been ignored, the Bulletin’s annual Doomsday clock — which was updated on Tuesday — still sits at five minutes to midnight. The clock is meant to convey the threats we face not only from nuclear weapons, but also from climate change and the potential unintended consequences of genetic engineering, which could be misused by those seeking to create bioweapons.

Until science and data become central to informing our public policies, our civilization will be hamstrung in confronting the gravest threats to its survival.

Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, is the author, most recently, of “A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.”

Springtime Is Sprung, Skulls Blooming, LIO Comic Style

Do You Have Burial, Funeral Insurance?

It is expensive to die!  A funeral is $5,000 minimum and can be much much more expensive ($15,000 before you blink, and up).  That doesn't count the cemetery.  Burial can be another $6,000 minimum and can also be much much more expensive.  So you're looking at $11,000 and maybe MUCH more.  Are you prepared for this?  Who's paying this?  You?  Your kids?  Your family?  Do your loved ones a big favor and figure this out, and pay for it, before you die!  It is very hard to do the above after you've died.  Your survivors will be grieving.

Insurance might be an answer.  It's not for everyone.  Make sure that there is an inflation allowance, as death will be more expensive in the future.

Chinua Achebe, R.I.P., Africa's Voice Of Conscience

Chinua Achebe, 82, Africa’s voice of 

conscience

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By Hillel Italie and Jon Gambrell, ASSOCIATED PRESS

POSTED: March 22, 2013

Chinua Achebe, the internationally celebrated Nigerian author, statesman and dissident, died at age 82 in Boston on Thursday after a brief illness. He lived through times of traumatic change in Nigeria and Africa alike. Among his many honored works, his novel Things Fall Apart has become the most widely read novel by an African.

Mr. Achebe knew both the prestige of serving on government commissions and the fear of being declared an enemy of the state. He spent much of his adult life in the United States but never stopped calling for democracy in Nigeria or resisting literary honors from a government he refused to accept.

In traffic today in Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, hawkers sell pirated copies of his recent memoir about the Biafra war, There Was a Country.

"What has consistently escaped most Nigerians in this entire travesty is the fact that mediocrity destroys the very fabric of a country as surely as a war - ushering in all sorts of banality, ineptitude, corruption and debauchery," wrote Mr. Achebe, whose death was confirmed by Brown University, where he taught.

His eminence worldwide was rivaled only by that of Gabriel García Marquez, Toni Morrison, and a handful of other writers. Mr. Achebe was a moral and literary model for countless Africans and a profound influence on such American-based writers as Ha Jin, Junot Díaz and Morrison, who once called Mr. Achebe's work an "education" for her and "liberating in a way nothing had been before."

For Mr. Achebe, "the African context held the very question of human existence," said Lewis Gordon, professor of philosophy, religion, Jewish studies, and African American studies at Temple University. His works may have begun with Africa, but they broadened out to all humanity, says Lewis, "which is why Things Fall Apart is read all around the world."

Gabeba Baderoon, assistant professor of women's studies and African and African American studies at Penn State, said by e-mail: "I'm so sad to hear about the passing of a writer we in African literature think of as a necessary and foundational figure. Professor Achebe inspired all of us to be fearless and original from the beginning."

A native of Ogidi, Nigeria, Mr. Achebe regarded his life as a bartering between conflicting cultures. He spoke of the "two types of music" running through his mind, Ibo legends and the prose of Dickens. He was also exposed to different faiths: His father worked in a local missionary and was among the first in their village to convert to Christianity.

His public life began in his mid-20s, when Nigeria was still under British rule. He was a resident of London when he completed his handwritten manuscript for Things Fall Apart, a short novel about a Nigerian tribesman's downfall at the hands of British colonialists.

Turned down by several publishers, the book was finally accepted by Heinemann and released in 1958 with a first printing of 2,000. Its initial review in The New York Times ran less than 500 words, but the novel soon became among the most important books of the 20th century, a universally acknowledged starting point for postcolonial, indigenous African fiction, the prophetic union of British letters and African oral culture.

Things Fall Apart has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages.

He also wrote short stories, poems, children's stories and a political satire, The Anthills of Savannah, a 1987 release that was the last full-length fiction to come out in his lifetime. Paralyzed from the waist down since a 1990 auto accident, he lived for years in a cottage built for him on the campus of Bard College, a leading liberal arts school north of New York City where he was a faculty member. He joined Brown in 2009 as a professor of languages and literature. He used a wheelchair in his later years and said his physical problems and displacement from home stifled his imaginative powers.

Gordon pointed out that the directness and universality of Mr. Achebe's fiction also made him an important essayist: "Like Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he saw the novel as an act of courage. And he saw the essay as allowing him to speak directly to people."

Mr. Achebe never won the Nobel Prize, which many thought he deserved. In 2007 he was awarded the Man Booker International Prize, a $120,000 honor for lifetime achievement.

"The world will miss his courageous and mountainous talent," Baderoon said. "A world without him feels unanchored."

---

Inquirer staff writer John Timpane contributed to this story.

Philadelphia Inquirer, Sat., March 23, 2013, Front Page (bottom half), Page A1

Walking Dead Zombie Apocalypse Week Marathon Begins Mon., Mar. 25

The Walking Dead Zombie Apocalypse Week Marathon Begins Mon., Mar. 25

The Walking Dead fans are about to get one step closer to experiencing the zombie apocalypse first-hand: Next week AMC kicks off Zombie Apocalypse Week, airing each episode of The Walking Dead to date every night in primetime. It all begins Mon., Mar. 25 with the series premiere, "Days Gone Bye" at 8/7c. Throughout the week, episodes from Seasons 1 and 2 will air in order, followed by a Season 3 marathon on Sat., Mar. 30 at 8/7c that leads up to the Season 3 Finale, "Welcome to the Tombs" on Sun., Mar. 31 at 9/8c. Lock the doors, close the windows and stockpile your survival gear. Next week, AMC's Zombie Apocalypse hits home.

Click here for a full schedule of The Walking Dead on AMC.