Things are OK for me, why do I care about this. I care because I think we grownups are doing a wretched job of managing the world and we need to do things a whole lot differently to create healthy children who will do better when they have a chance.

There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world (a third of the people on the planet); and, for many centuries, Muslims had the most advanced civilizations on the planet. There are 7 million Muslims in America and about 6000 in Palm Beach County. This web folder began as an exploration to help in learning more about Islam and especially Muslims in southeast Florida.

St. Gregory's Episcopal Church had an Abrahamic evening on Jan 10'07 and we did a pretty good job of including all 3 faiths. It was just a beginning, as Rabbi Steinhardt said, but it was a good beginning. We had 224 people including I'll guess 20-30 Muslims and lots of Jews and Christians (I think I was told 80 from our church). We followed that up on Jan 24'08 with "Cities of Light: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain" with film-maker Alex Kronemer. (need to add a sentence here on the excellent quality of this evening).

FAU had an all day "trialogue" workshop on Feb 12'07 with approximately 1000 attendees, nearly all Jewish. The intellectual quality of their workshop was, I thought, superb, but more should be done to include local Muslims in the FAU trialogue. FAU repeated that seminar on Feb 11'08 with similar success.

One concern we've had has been that mainstream American media don't do a good job of reporting on Islam. We began collecting stories that would be a better source of learning. Recently we've discovered an excellent e-mail service by CAIR (The Council on American-Islamic Relations) that they will send you if you request it.

When he was awarded the Templeton Prize, Philosopher Charles Taylor, voiced alarm at "creeping Islamophobia". We hope to be at least a small voice against that.