Prisoners of Hope

This text is usually read on Palm Sunday. But on Palm Sunday we usually don't hear anything about the "prisoners" of this text.

There's a website called Sporcle that provides what it calls "mentally stimulating diversions" -- a highfalutin name for trivia games. These games require you to answer a series of questions against a clock, and many of them are quite challenging.

One of these quizzes deals with 15 important peace treaties. The game tells you the years and what the treaties accomplished, and then gives you six minutes to come up with the 15 treaty names (see sidebar on page 11). For example: What's the 1721 treaty that ended the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia? The answer is the Treaty of Nystad. You already knew that, right?

Our highly educated and brainy senior editor played the treaty game and was able to come up with three of 15, which beats this writer by two. But that's perhaps not surprising, for if you wanted to know the names of the world's peace treaties, there'd be a lot of them to remember. Wikipedia has a site with a single-space list of the known historic agreements, pacts,...