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After he became a follower of Russian Orthodox Christianity, he spoke critically of Western Christian beliefs, and of the sacred music they yielded, including the works of Bach. In recent years this view softened: in 2007, he told a New York Times interviewer that he had reconsidered some of his beliefs and had returned to playing Bach on the organ. "I reached a point where everything I wrote was terribly austere and hidebound by the tonal system of the Orthodox Church," he said, "and I felt the need, in my music at least, to become more universalist: to take in other colors, other languages."

Personalized music arousing elderly w/ dementia, ?"locked-in"

"To find this out, researchers of the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden studied the heart rates of high school choir members as they joined their voices. Their findings, published this week in Frontiers in Neuroscience, confirm that choir music has calming effects on the heart - especially when sung in unison."

Jud Newborn, a Holocaust scholar who lives in Plainview, was doing research in Munich as a graduate student in the early 1980s when he became intrigued with the story of the White Rose resistance movement. The small, student-based group wrote and printed anonymous anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich and distributed them in that city and beyond before its key members were captured and executed in 1943. Dr. Newborn, who earned a doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago, is the co-author with Annette Dumbach of a book on the White Rose and has developed a multimedia lecture on the subject. In recognition of Holocaust Remembrance Day (April 8 this year), he will present the lecture at two Long Island synagogues. The lecture will be accompanied by nearly 80 historical images, including photographs, posters and newspaper articles, as well as recorded music. Dr. Newborn may also occasionally speak with a mock-German accent when quoting Nazi officials, in the service of his White Rose presentation. (The second half of the program focuses on more contemporary figures who have acted heroically against great odds.)

Sister Rose Pacatte of the Daughters of St. Paul moved through Sundance [as] a veteran film critic. Sister Rose [has] serv[ed] not as a sentry protecting religious belief from cinematic product, but rather as a mediator helping to explain one to the other. As such, she embodies a departure both from the religious temptation to police popular culture, and the effort in fundamentalist circles to create a parallel universe of theologically safe movies, television and music. "To paraphrase a Gospel passage, Christ came into the world to redeem the culture, not to condemn it," Sister Rose, 61, said in an interview here. "It's a negotiation. You don't give everything a free pass. Something has to come out of your convictions and values. But what matters isn't what the movie contains, but what it means."

'Some atheists have even gone public with their own prayer-for-health's-sake practice. Sigfried Gold, (recent subject in Washington Post) is a thoughtful, articulate 50-y.o. man who lives in Takoma Park, Md., He long ago decided that there was no stuff in the universe that was not physical - no supernatural, no divine. So he joined a 12-step program to control his food addiction. One of the steps is to turn your problem over to a higher power. So Mr. Gold created a god he doesn't believe exists: a large African-American lesbian. Every day Mr. Gold dropped to his knees to pray, and every day he spent 30 minutes in meditative quiet time. These days Mr. Gold, who calls himself a "born-again atheist," doesn't smoke. He doesn't drink. And, at 5 feet 7 inches, he weighs 150 pounds. So is there a downside? There were times when people got so engrossed with prayer that they seemed almost addicted - so compelled to pray that they could not stop. Some called this "puking" prayer. Whom does this intense imaginative immersion put at risk, and when? A study of the popular Internet game World of Warcraft suggests an intriguing answer. The anthropologist Jeffrey G. Snodgrass and his colleagues set out to study this complex social world. They found people who were relaxed and soothed by their play: "Sometimes I just log on late at night and go out by myself and listen to the soothing music." Others felt addicted: "Once I start playing it's hard to tell whether or not I'll have the willpower to stop." What made the difference was whether people found their primary sense of self inside the game or in the world. When play seemed more important than the real world did, they felt addicted; when it enhanced their experience of reality outside the game, they felt soothed. Prayer works in similar ways. When people use prayer to enhance their real-word selves, they feel good. When it disconnects them from the everyday, as it did for the

Palm Pre- & Pixi-Plus phones via Sprint & Verizon - advtgs include multitasking (eg, music while checking email), BECOMES WiFi hot spot (which others can use w/i 150 ft) at $40 extra/mo. "Good for non-techies"

God knows, there was great literature before there was the codex, and should it pass away, there will be great literature after it. But if we stop reading on paper, we should keep in mind what we're sacrificing: that nonlinear experience, which is unique to the codex. You don't get it from any other medium - not movies, or TV, or music or video games. The codex won out over the scroll because it did what good technologies are supposed to do: It gave readers a power they never had before, power over the flow of their own reading experience. And until I hear God personally say to me, "Boot up and read," I won't be giving it up.