For the people of India, it came as no surprise that Osama Bin Laden was found and killed just a couple hours from Pakistan's capital, Islamabad.

"Well, in a nutshell the reaction has really been we told you so," says Sadanand Dhume, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and columnist for the Wall Street Journal's Asia edition.

Since 1947, India and Pakistan have faced off in war three times, and in the last decade tensions have escalated since terrorist attacks in India were linked to militants with Pakistani ties.

For many, finding bin Laden in the military town of Abbattabod only "reinforced the long-held Indian view Pakistan is complicit in global terrorism," Dhume tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

via NPR.

He put away the rage, though. He locked it up. He decided that he would be a more effective tool of punishment if he did not speak the rage inside him, did not attempt to describe it, to verbalize the rage itself. Bin Laden never ranted or raved as other men of great violence do. The speeches of Adolf Hitler are always a touching point. Hitler would whip himself into a frenzy as he spoke, driving himself into heights of outrage that spilled over and into the audience. The point was to unleash those demons of violence in himself and therefore let everyone listening know that they, too, could unleash those demons. Hitler wanted to sculpt a German public that was comfortable with the angry and dark passions of violence. He wanted them to feel that rage was appropriate and that the actions resulting from rage were the natural next step. Hitler never found it difficult to express his rage. He gloried in expressing it. He lived to express it. He became one of the acknowledged masters of expressing rage.

Osama bin Laden went the opposite route. His was the calm and deliberate side of violence.

via The Smart Set.

For comparison, here's a bit from Hitler at Nuremberg.

The Mountain from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

Tony Woodlief in Image:

It’s a galling irony that I am frequently asked to speak to young people, to tell them something about life, and what I have learned in mine, and what they should therefore go and do with theirs.

It is an irony because my life feels like a slow-moving disaster, and most nights all I can hope is that if the second half doesn’t bring redemption, perhaps it will bring something different than what I have lived thus far.

I don’t tell them this, because young people don’t want to hear about your mistakes, other than the salacious details. Our mistakes are usually more interesting to us, and they don’t help anyone anyway; mostly we each commit our sins thinking we are doing right, or that we can’t bear for another second whatever it is that’s crushing us. What good is someone’s else’s cautionary tale in the face of false virtue or aching hunger?

via Andrew Sullivan.

So I warn them that while I have hopes for them, my greatest hope is that they can live better lives than I.

Then I direct them to the words of Frederick Buechner.

I love Fred. More than once, when I’d thought too long about where I could go to put my 9 mm in my mouth, how I might arrange it so my children wouldn’t be the ones to find the corpse, it was Buechner’s words that assuaged my impulse to self-destruction.

Buechner, who found the body of his own father, a suicide. Sweet, tortured Buechner, the minister who does not preach in a church, but in pages.

The particular words of Buechner’s to which I direct them concern vocation. What he says is that our vocation is that place where our deep gladness meets the world’s great hunger. “In a world where there is so much drudgery, so much grief, so much emptiness and fear and pain, our gladness in our work is as much needed as we ourselves need to be glad.”

These are scandalous notions, that we need to be glad, that the world needs our gladness. Our Puritan forbears were certainly suspicious of gladness, and their modern, secular inheritors of grimness—professors and politicians and preachers—demand not gladness, but utility.

Finally:

Do you know what brings you gladness?

It would be a pity to reach the end of this life not having known, not having stretched out our hands toward the gladness for which we were surely crafted. But it’s a frightening thing, to look fully at our work and relationships and amusements, to gauge whether they bring us true gladness, or just momentary respite from fear, from hurt, from regret.

So here’s my offer to you, dear stranger: I’ll look if you look.

And may we each have the courage to embrace what is good for us, what draws us nearer to ourselves and to God, no matter from what it draws us away. Because if we don’t find our gladness, and pursue it to the deep-running needs of this world, how will our children ever know to do the same?

I just returned from a bike ride with Micah.  That makes me glad, every time.

A very thoughtful and articulate deconstruction of Sam Harris & the new atheism:

Harris is oblivious to this moral crisis. His self-confidence is surpassed only by his ignorance, and his writings are the best argument against a scientific morality—or at least one based on his positivist version of science and ex cathedra pronouncements on politics, ethics and the future of humanity. In The Moral Landscape he observes that people (presumably including scientists) often acquire beliefs about the world for emotional and social rather than cognitive reasons: “It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.” The description fits Harris all too aptly, as he wanders from neuroscience into ethics and politics. He may well be a fine neuroscientist. He might consider spending more time in his lab.

via The Nation.