I'm amazed at just who I hear accusing Islam of dreadful things. Some of the time, at least, it's well educated and otherwise open-minded people. But they've read or heard something. They can quote a passage from the Koran (as though they couldn't find a similar passage in the Bible). Responding with names of words of Islamic leaders who are eloquent for peace and community building, or citing Islam's huge contribution to preserving classical literature and laying the renaissance groundwork for modern science, or naming the historic periods and contemporary places of peaceful coexistence Christians and Muslims carries no weight in these arguments. Absolutely none. It's a bogeyman, communist under the bed, 'enemies out to destroy us,' world and offering information to the contrary (these friends and acquaintances claim) is just naively falling for Islamist propaganda.

It reminds me of my daughter's experience in middle school. She'd come home in tears or angry from facing a constant stream of her peers telling her what she 'really believed' because she was a Christian (most of it quite horrifying to her and none of it remotely what she heard in church). It was that and peers patiently explaining to her (as accurate news that she had apparently overlooked) that priests can't marry so if her dad was a priest, her parents weren't married.

This was two different voices speaking to her - kids from secularist households and kids from Roman Catholic households, but both engaged in this early adolescent folly of claiming to know someone else's own experience better than they do themselves.

It's painful to see adult culture sinking to the same level. It's not just the Anglican communion - the whole world needs a listening process.

I wish we could all move away from the locution "moderate Muslims." There are ORDINARY Muslims, one fifth of the world's population -- and some smallish number of people claiming that faith tradition who for whatever reason use their tradition to justify their violence. In this, the latter are just like a tiny number of so-called Christians who chose to believe their tradition calls on them to beat up gays and bomb abortion providers.

We're not "moderate" Christians -- we're just Christians, limping along, doing our best. Most Muslims are similar.

Found this interesting:

http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/reflections_on_the_meeting_between_catholics_and_muslims_at_the_pontifical_/0015925

It has not escaped the attention of the Pontifical Council, likewise, that our document is addressed to all branches of the Christian family. We have been heartened by the warmth of the speedy response from very many Christian church leaders and thinkers from the Reformed tradition, and we have agreed to meet their representatives for a significant theological engagement in Yale this July. The response from the Anglican Church has been warm and heartfelt, and we look forward also to our forthcoming meeting with Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and other Anglican theologians later this year in Cambridge. We are also grateful for the energy with which Georgetown University has set in train arrangements for our meeting there in January of 2009. Likewise, the particular demographics of many Middle Eastern countries ensures that relations with the Orthodox Churches will be vital to our concerns, and initial reactions from Moscow and Istanbul have already demonstrated the importance of the Common Word initiative in those important centres of Christian ecclesial life.