What happens when you hold the World Cup in Germany

Milosevic hangs up his S&M boots

Sooooo not as titillating as it sounds.

Gotta have faith, faith, faith. Baby?

When my mom and I were talking the other day, she mentioned that she had just read a book that had disturbed her deeply. In a strange coincidence, I had borrowed the book she was talking about - Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven - about twenty minutes before we spoke. Strange how that happens sometimes.
She told me that I should start the book - an examination of radical faith in the American context through the [cracked] lens of Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints - with the author's note at the end. It was interesting advice.
Krakauer's afterword tries to explain his writerly curiosity about religion. In the process, he articulates the experience of agnosticism with such righteous power that my jealousy and my agreement are somewhat confused:

I don't know what God is, or what God had in mind when the universe was set in motion. in fact, I don't know if God even exists, although I confess that I sometimes find myself praying in times of fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty.
There are some ten thousand extant religious sects - each with its own cosmology, each with its own answer for the meaning of life and death. Most assert that the other 9,999 not only have it completely wrong, but are instruments of evil, besides. None of the ten thousand has yet persuaded me to make the requisite leap of faith. in the absence of conviction, I've come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain - which doesn't strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief.
And if I remain in the dark about our purpose here, and the meaning of eternity, I have nevertheless arrived at an understanding of a few more modest truths: Most of us fear death. Most of us yearn to comprehend how we got here, and why - which is to say, most of us ache to know the love of our creator. And we will no doubt feel that ache, most of us, for as long as we happen to be alive.

Uh, damn.