5. Any Little Feat show. These guys don’t play concerts. For one thing, they usually play small venues – clubs, bars, small auditoriums. For another, they play a completely different set list every night, even when they’re on a regular tour, choosing from hundreds of songs they know. Some jams will go on for 15 minutes or more and incorporate two or three different songs, plus a whole lot of improvisation. After seeing a Little Feat show for the first time, an acquaintance said they were “a lot like the Grateful Dead, only real musicians.” I have a signed copy of the classic Little Feat album, “Dixie Chicken,” on my wall at home, plus one of their set lists (from a gig in Jackson Hole, Wyoming). Even if you’re not a fan of jam music, if Little Feat comes to town, go see them. I personally guarantee you won’t be disappointed. Tragically, founding drummer Richie Hayward, whom I've met several times and whose inimitable style drives the band, has liver cancer (which usually does not have a good prognosis). He's only 63.

4. Sweet Georgia Brown at the now-defunct Blue Note jazz club in Las Vegas. This was such a perfect night. It was a very small venue, sort of like a jazz club from the 50s. Sweet Georgia Brown is a little-known blues singer who belts it out with the gusto of Aretha, though surely with not as much raw talent. Anyway, it was a great night made greater by the fact that Georgia invited folks up on stage to dance with her during her rendition of Proud Mary, and Kathleen kicked off her shoes and got up there and blew the place away.

3. KISS and Uriah Heep in concert, Salt Lake City, 1977. Don’t give me any crap about this. I was 18 and KISS had just released Destroyer and they were the biggest band on the planet. Plus, I actually liked Uriah Heep (and I still do). Uriah Heep opened and, honestly, they were so much better than KISS that I don’t understand why the boys in makeup and platform shoes let them on the stage. (Go find some ‘70s Heep and listen to Ken Hensley shake the world with his Hammond B3.) The music was so loud that my ears rang for days and I’ll probably have future hearing loss from that evening alone. All of the people on our row were smoking pot (and we even helped them pass the joints along), but my buddies and I were good Mormon kids and didn’t partake. Alas, we didn’t know about the effects of second-hand marijuana smoke, so we were pretty looped by the time the show was over. We went to an IHOP, where one of our group ordered strawberry waffles and a root beer float. I thought it was so funny that I tumbled onto the floor in laughter. I really don’t recall much about the drive home.

2. North Park Apostolic Pentecostal gospel choir. Kathleen dragged me to this huge church north of San Diego one Sunday. I was skeptical and more than a little intimidated. I grew up listening to Mo Tab (Mormon Tabernacle Choir) and classic rock, with a little heavy metal thrown in when I didn’t think my parents were listening. On Saturday night we had seen blues guitarist Robben Ford in a small club and I figured I had my music fix for this trip. Here’s how ignorant and biased I was (and probably still am) – since the church was in a relatively seedy area of suburban San Diego and I was driving my brand-new BMW 330xi, I feared for its life in the parking lot. I’m an idiot. Kathleen prevailed, and when we pulled in the lot held its share of modest automobiles, but more than a fair share of Mercedes, Cadillacs, Audis, Jags and, yes, BMWs. In fact, my car didn’t turn a head in that lot. But you’re here for the music. After a warm welcome by the folks at the door (and later by the preacher, who had us stand up and introduce ourselves in the 800-seat auditorium, undoubtedly never having had a nice couple from Idaho on the premises), we sat in the pews and listened to 45 minutes of the some best music I’ve ever heard. This is not because I was necessarily moved by the spirit (we eventually left when some of the nice people on the stand began speaking in tongues), but because the singers and musicians were spectacularly gifted and deeply passionate. They blew Robben Ford away (sorry, Robben).

1. The Eagles in concert. I know, I know. The Eagles. They were expensive and highly rehearsed, but that turned out to be the magic. They played for three-and-a-half hours and, near as I could tell didn’t miss a note (this was in San Jose in 2005). Precise harmonies, expert musicianship, the right amount of in-between chat with the audience and superb sound made for an unforgettable night.

Runners-up (in no particular order): Cowboy Junkies at Grand Targhee; Journey at Sun Valley; Regina Belle at Blues Alley in Georgetown, D.C.; Moody Blues with the Utah Symphony at the old Salt Palace; house band night at the House of Blues, New Orleans; Lyle Lovett and his Large Band at Grand Targhee; Santana at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas; Lynyrd Skynyrd at Indianapolis (long story, that); house blues band in a small basement club in Chicago; walking down Bourbon Street any time, any season.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s recent piece in the New York Times on the interaction between religion and science is worth the time. Smith, literary critic at Duke and English professor at Brown, has several thoughtful observations on this often inflammatory topic. For instance, Smith urges that apparent conflicts between science and religion

need not exist in the ongoing lives and experiences of individuals. For neither logic nor rationality requires that all our ideas, impulses, affections, and acts be mutually aligned all the time.

Yet she rightly suspects problems in approaches that compartmentalize religion versus science, or attempt to make them complementary.

The former, as exemplified in Stephen J. Gould’s nonoverlapping magisteria, fails to capture the relation between them and “though seeking to counter views that lead to the dismissal of religion in the name of scientific knowledge, goes some distance to reinforcing them.” Smith continues:

Indeed, I’m inclined to say that Gould’s proposed partition of the territory (that is, facts and accounts of the natural world to science, values and instructions for moral conduct to religion) is, like many political partitions, objectionable in principle and unworkable in practice.

Finally and most seriously, I think that the idea of science and religion as counterpoised monoliths deepens prevailing misunderstandings of both. As I emphasize throughout the book, the kinds of things that can be assembled under the term “religion” are exceptionally diverse. They range from personal experiences and popular beliefs to formal doctrines, priestly institutions, ritual practices and devotional icons — Neanderthal burial rites to Vatican encyclicals. The same can be said of “science,” a term that embraces a wide range of quite different kinds of things — general pursuits and specialized practices, findings and theories, instruments and techniques, ideals and institutions (not to mention a share of devotional icons and ritual practices).

Smith also laments how her thoughtful views (my description, not hers), and the nuanced topic of the interaction between religion and science itself, are so often caricatured. Comments to an earlier column so often missed the point:

A good number consist of off-to-the-races polemics on science and religion having little to do with either the book or column. Others object to my presumed views based on inappropriate surmise.

Welcome to the debate. From newspaper headlines and TV news reports to blog comments, the complexities of both religion and science, not to mention their interaction, are so often lost. But complex they are:

Science and religion, in Gould’s account, are nicely balanced and occupy equally valuable pieces of land, but they remain monoliths — precisely, as one commentator puts it, “rocks of ages.” In “Natural Reflections,” I seek to pulverize both of those rocks, not in order to annihilate them but in order to reveal their complex, copious, varied, and changing composition.

And one of those complexities, so often ignored from the start, is the religion that makes its way into the column labeled as science, and the science that makes its way into the column labeled as religion.